If you do a lot of walking or standing in heels, such footwear will throw your body out of alignment, putting excessive pressure on the balls of your feet, your toe joints, your ankles and knees, and forcing your hip joints and lower back to cope with your body movements at awkward angles. This can cause a good deal of discomfort while you’re trotting around in your high-heeled footwear, and can give you problems in the affected joints in the medium to long term. Over many years of wearing high-heeled shoes for all kinds of activities, your calf muscles may even become permanently shortened, and your Achilles tendons may stiffen. As a result, at some point, you’re going to find that it actually hurts physically to stand or walk in your bare feet or in flat shoes.
Female ballet dancers who’ve spent many years dancing on pointe every day often face the same problem of shortened and stiffened leg muscles and tendons. Some of them, who start teaching dance classes after their performing careers come to an end, find that they can no longer just walk around a dance studio wearing flats as they instruct their students, because wearing flats now hurts. They’re forced to resort to shoes with at least a little bit of a heel to alleviate the calf and ankle pain.