Last summer I watched a woman cross Sefton Park barefoot, shoes hooked over one finger, entirely unbothered. Twenty minutes later she was still barefoot on the pavement outside the café, and that was the bit that made me wince. Those are two different activities with two different risk profiles, and almost everything written about urban barefoot walking treats them as one.
In Short
- Each foot has 26 bones and 33 joints, and they are held together by more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments that shoes do some of the work for
- Lieberman’s 2010 Nature study is about how habitually barefoot people land, not about whether going barefoot keeps you healthy
- The grounding literature is small, repetitive and carries declared commercial interests
- Grass and clean sand are the entry point. Pavements and public wet floors are where the trouble is
Your foot is doing more than you give it credit for
It is an active structure, not a platform. Each foot contains 26 bones and 33 joints, tied together by more than a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments, and a good part of that apparatus exists to adjust continuously to the ground underneath it. A supportive shoe does some of that adjusting for you, which is comfortable and, over years, means those small muscles do less.
Going barefoot on uneven ground hands the work back. The improvement people notice first is usually balance, because the sole is dense with nerve endings feeding position information back to the brain, and a thick cushioned midsole muffles that signal. This is the most defensible benefit on the list, and it is a modest one.
The Harvard study everyone cites here is Daniel Lieberman’s 2010 paper in Nature, which compared foot strike patterns in habitually barefoot and habitually shod runners. It found barefoot runners tend to land on the fore or mid foot, producing a smaller impact spike. It says nothing about walking to the shops, and nothing about injury rates.
Where the earthing claims come from
They come from a small and unusually self-contained body of research. The proposal is that the earth’s surface carries a mild negative charge, that direct skin contact transfers electrons, and that this reduces inflammation and normalises cortisol. The frequently quoted cortisol study involved around a dozen people sleeping on grounding sheets, with saliva samples taken at baseline and six weeks.
Two things keep me at arm’s length from it. The studies are tiny and cluster around the same handful of authors, and several of those authors have declared that they work for and hold shares in a company selling grounding products. That does not make the findings false. It does mean I would want independent replication before repeating any of it as fact, and there is very little.
What I will happily grant is the bit nobody needs a study for. Standing on grass with your shoes off in the middle of a working day feels good, and being outdoors and briefly not on a screen has a decent evidence base of its own. That is a plainer explanation for how people feel afterwards than electron transfer is.
The urban part is where this gets complicated
Not all city ground is equal, and the trend talks as though it is. Here is roughly how I would rank what is actually underfoot in a place like Liverpool.
| Surface | Worth it? | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Park grass, mown and dry | Yes, this is the one | Dog fouling, hidden glass near bins and benches |
| Clean beach sand | Yes, and it works the foot hardest | Sharp shells, tide line debris, sunburn on the tops of the feet |
| Your own floors at home | Yes, and it is the easiest place to start | Nothing much, beyond hard flooring feeling monotonous |
| City pavement | Rarely | Glass, needles, metal, and tarmac hot enough to burn on a rare good day |
| Changing rooms, pool surrounds, gym showers | No | Warm wet floors spread verrucas and athlete’s foot efficiently |
The risks worth naming out loud
The realistic one is a cut you do not notice at the time. Broken glass and small metal fragments are the standard finds in a city, an unremarkable puncture wound can become an infection, and if your tetanus cover is not up to date a deep one is a reason to ring your GP rather than shrug.
Verrucas are the other everyday hazard, and they are not really an outdoor problem. The virus behind them spreads on warm wet floors, which means the pool surround and the gym changing room, not the park. Hookworm gets mentioned in every article on this subject; in a country with modern sanitation the risk is effectively zero, and it belongs in the travel section rather than here.
Who should skip this entirely
Anyone whose feet cannot reliably report an injury. That means diabetes, peripheral neuropathy, poor circulation, or any history of a foot ulcer. Reduced sensation is exactly the situation in which a small cut goes unnoticed, gets infected and becomes serious, and podiatrists are unambiguous about barefoot walking in that group.
Ongoing foot pain is a softer no. Plantar fasciitis and similar problems sometimes improve with more foot work and sometimes flare badly, and which one you get is not something to find out by trial and error on a pavement.
Minimalist shoes are the honest compromise
They keep the sensation and lose most of the risk. A minimalist shoe has a flat sole, a thin one, and a toe box wide enough for your toes to spread, which lets the foot move roughly as it would unshod while a few millimetres of rubber deal with the glass. For city use this is simply the more sensible option.
One caution attached to the category. Vibram settled a US class action in 2014 over its FiveFingers marketing and agreed to drop health claims it could not support, and the transition to minimalist footwear carries its own documented risk of bone stress in the foot if you rush it. I went into that in more detail in my piece on what the barefoot running research actually shows, and the same slow timeline applies to walking.
A four-week way in that will not hurt you
- Week one, indoors only. Barefoot at home in the evenings, on whatever floors you have.
- Week two, add ten minutes on mown grass. Scan the ground before you take your shoes off, especially near bins.
- Week three, extend to twenty or thirty minutes and add an uneven surface if you have one nearby, such as sand or a gravel path you can tolerate.
- Week four, decide honestly whether to keep going barefoot outdoors or to buy a pair of minimalist shoes and do it properly on pavement.
- Throughout, wash your feet when you come in and look at your soles. Thirty seconds, every time.
My own conclusion, having tried this on and off for a summer: the grass is genuinely lovely and I have kept it, the pavement was never worth it, and my balance did improve in a way I noticed standing on one leg to fix my own shoe strap. Small, real, and nothing to do with electrons.
This is general information and not medical advice. Do not walk barefoot if you have diabetes, nerve damage or circulation problems in your feet, and see a GP or podiatrist about any wound that is not healing or any foot pain that persists.
Sources: Lieberman DE et al., Foot strike patterns and collision forces in habitually barefoot versus shod runners, Nature 463, 2010; published grounding and earthing research including the Ghaly and Teplitz cortisol study and the 2015 Oschman, Chevalier and Brown review with its declared conflicts of interest; UK podiatry guidance on foot care in diabetes; reporting on the 2014 Vibram FiveFingers settlement.
Would you actually do this on a city pavement?
I am curious where the line sits for everyone else, because mine turned out to be the park gate. Tell me in the comments how far you would take your shoes off.
Read about plogging, the run that clears the glass off the path