Your shoes killed 1 muscle in your big toe. Now your arch, ankle and knee are all compensating for it. You don’t have weak feet. You have a big toe that forgot how to do its job. The adductor hallucis is a muscle most people have never heard of, but it runs along the inside of your foot and it’s responsible for two critical functions: keeping your big toe aligned and supporting your medial arch. Modern shoes, especially anything with a narrow toe box, do all the stabilizing work for this muscle. Over years, it atrophies. Your big toe drifts. Your arch loses its primary support. And here’s where it gets interesting. The body doesn’t just let the foot collapse without a fight. Your tibialis posterior, the deep calf muscle that also supports the arch, starts overworking to compensate. Your peroneals on the outer ankle tighten up. Your gluteus medius fires harder to prevent your knee from caving. You end up with pain in your calves, your ankles, your knees, even your hips, and the origina...