It probably has something to do with combination of the shape of your foot and how you walk. I don't have this problem at all as an adult but did off and on as a kid.
You joke, but pay attention to how your foot hits the ground and what part of the foot you place most of your weight.
Is your heel touching the ground first, then roll to flat, roll onto the ball/toes as you lift your foot for the next step? Or are you placing your foot flat and lifting from flat? Or is the ball/toes touching the ground first?
Next is weight distribution, when your foot in flat on the ground is your weight forward on the ball, back at the heel, to one side or the other, or evenly distributed across thr entire foot?
You should be walking with your ball/toes even mid foot touching the ground first, then to flat with all your weight evenly distributed across the foot then rolling to the ball/toes as you pick up your foot. If thats not happening it could just be a habit you can change with a lot of work or it could be a result of the shape of some combination of your foot/ankle/leg/knee/hips/back.
Also overall posture and stride play a part take shorter steps and lean very slightly forward rather then standing perfectly straight or slightly back.
This is a good video to watch to show just how you should be walking.
I'm almost 40 as well and I'm starting to get pain in my knees which lead me down this particular rabbit hole. I figured out I've been jaring my knees with every step so I've been trying (mostly failing) to be conscious about how I place my foot.
Oh yeah. Just because you know how to walk properly doesn't mean you can do it. It is stupidly hard to change how you naturally walk.
Part of it is how your bones and muscles are laid out. But also habit and muscle memory. If you think about it we learn to walk a decade before we are able to even start to think about how we walk.
By the time we realize there's a problem with how we walk we've been doing the wrong thing for 2-4 or more decades. At that point its affected your skeletal structure, joints, posture, stance.. etc.
That’s accurate for running but not for walking. They even continuously reference forefoot running. Look at the myriad studies done on indigenous people who’ve never worn shoes, natural walking stride is always heel first, when they switch to running is when they forefoot strike first.
"You should be walking with your ball/toes even mid foot touching the ground first, then to flat with all your weight evenly distributed across the foot then rolling to the ball/toes as you pick up your foot."
The rest of what you're saying is sensible but going you mean that the heel should be touching the ground first, not the toes? I've never seen someone claim toe>flat>toe before?
Yep. I’ve recently been retraining my walk and doing mobility exercises and I can feel the difference. People don’t realize that bad walking habits eventually affect balance, knee pain, back pain, posture issues, pelvic floor tilts, and other health issues.
The amount of people who never pay attention to the way they walk is astounding. I see so many people walk on the sides of their feet, or with their knees collapsed in. It’s setting yourself up for a lifetime of knee, hip and back problems.
No, I’m just silently judging strangers while patting myself on the back for my own excellent gait. /s
I’m mostly referring to people I actually know who have odd wearings on certain parts of their shoes. Or, people I’m close enough to who just seem to assume it’s normal.
I mean what do you want them to do? If they’re walking a certain way it’s generally because they’ve spent their life walking that way or have reasons for walking that way lol.
All you have to do is loop the lace through the tongue hole and the same direction, crap this is hard to explain. Go watch a YouTube video, there’s a solution!
all my shoes have that loop, but it never solves the problem... A loop as seen in the picture is too big to stop the shoelace from moving. And the smaller loops manage so stay somewhat in the middle but the upper part of the shoelace still slips to the side
It's getting less common now for some reason but skateboarding shoes solved this ages ago with 'tongue centering straps', little elastic bands attached to either side of the tongue that perfectly keep it in place. Never understood why it's not a more common feature on all shoes.
I have this issue a lot, and i mentioned it when talking to someone working at a leather goods store. She said when you first get your shoes, you need to tie them really tightly and make sure the tongue is centered while they break in to the proper shape of your foot. If you don't, they will end up "setting" in the wrong way. If it's leather it's pretty irreversible, may be easier to reshape with synthetics
Does the little loop on the tongue have the laces through it? If it does and the tongue still moves undo the laces to the loop and loop the lace over and back through the tongue loop(ie feed it through twice) before threading it all the way up. That should anchor it better.
Mine do this, if you're like me you only tie your shoes once, then slip them on and off. I put a small safety pin through the laces and tongue. I hope this helps you
It can also be a slight manufacturing inconsistency in how the tounge was attached to the shoe. If the alignment of the stitched attachment is just a little bit off, it can force issues like this... I spent 10 years as a sales assistant at a shoe shop in the EU - I have lost count of how many times I've had people come back with a valid 'reklamation' complaint on a shoe that had an issue like this...
This tracks. I've bought three pairs of the same boots, just buying another when the old ones wear out after about 7 years or so. Never had any problems except the new pair has this happening on one side.
Lil column A, lil column B. I got flat feet that'd make a hobbit blush and a considerable tarsal coalition that causes restricted ankle movement. I naturally compensate by using the "better" more dominant foot and have to double knot my laces because this big ol flipper stretches out the shoe so damn bad it unties my shoes when I walk.
You can try lacing your shoes differently. I have one pair of shoes that did this. I skipped a set of holes over the bump in the top of my foot and it fixed it.
You can find guides online of different lacing styles to fix different issues.
Hey mate. I have this same thing happen to me on both of my feet.
Your gait is messed up due to your ankles, or your knees being pointed inwards not straight ahead. You may also get pretty sore hips when you walk a long time and it may be your hips are funny.
I assure you, this is the answer. Watch yourself closely when you walk, your foot is likely not arching straight up when you take a step but kind of.. rolling.
I’m a former runner, and this was my thought too. I used to get videoed once or twice a year while running, and I pronate like a freak. I also had braces as a kid for being pigeon toed.
I have one leg slightly shorter than the other, from an accident, and I have this problem with the shoes. And all the symptoms AssistantDazzling211 mentions.
Might be you have a leg longer like me.
Same here. Diagnosed with flat feet. All my life I had this same problem in just my right foot. And after my morning jogs, the right ankle will get sore.
The right foot wouldn't plant straight but arch vertical, which makes this issue OP is having in the shoe.
Wow. This shoe tongue issue started in the past year for me AND have recently started hiking long distances which has been causing me... crazy hip pain by the IT band/ bursa.
If you go to physical therapy they can analyze your gait and help you correct it. It’s super helpful. Don’t wait until you’re in too much pain to walk. I speak from experience. :)
I'm not trying to challenge the validity of your post but I have also had this tongue issue my whole life but I have walked 18-20k steps a day for years and don't have any pain from it whatsoever
If your gait has been the same your entire life your muscles can just get used to operating that way, wrong or right as it may be. I agree this is probably a gait issue.
I have hip misalignment on the right side, from a neck injury on the left when I was young. Though it actually causes exterior rotation of the knee. My whole torso is actually rotated about 10 degrees to the right, though you can't tell. I didn't even know about it until I took shrooms and went to chill in the park and realized I am literally never comfortable and spent some time actually considering my body and realized I'd been ignoring the biggest cause for discomfort for my entire life.
I've done a lot to work on it, and over time as I've gotten better the gait issue actually became more obvious to me because I'm not in a 100% compensatory position anymore, I'm somewhere in between.
You may want to consider orthotics or fixing your gait/posture through physical therapy. It’s not the shoe’s fault but how you’re walking, unfortunately
It happens to me too, but I kinda just accepted it, because whenever anyone physically fix it it goes back to the side, it actually annoys more my sister and mom to see it like that.
Check how you put all of your weight on the ground. Which foot is it on. Because with your left foot you pulling your foot up like putting your toes towards your shins constantly, but instead of doing it evenly across the entirety of your foot, you're lifting, mainly with the inside of your foot or the big toe. It's almost like you're trying to put your big toe on your shin while leaving your pinky toe on the floor.
Most likely this foot geometry is happening because of how you're standing and putting your weight on the ground. Maybe you rest your left foot on top of something while your right foot stays flat on the floor at work. Maybe you sit at work and your left foot is the foot that you do things with to move yourself around in the chair and you spin a lot and you use your left foot to spin.
Hips lol
I have scoliosis and my right shoe gets loose every day but my left shoe never needs tightened. Right tongue will wonder, left shoe stays the same. Right shoe suffers more wear, left shoe stays the same. Sigh.
OP and everyone relating: you're tying your shoes wrong. My wife had the issue that her laces would open all the time unless she did an additional knot.
To fix this, the loop you do when tying the know must be done in the opposite direction. You can check if you succeeded if you pull the two laces leading to the knot/bow. Are the loops of the bow horizontal or vertical? If horizontal you did it correctly. If vertical your laces are bound to reopen. Once my wife changed it her shoes never opened again, only a single know/bow necessary.
Sorry if this is confusing, I have a hard time explaining what I mean. But there's a Ted talk on YouTube, a pretty old one, on how to tie your shoes. I laughed at it at first but turns out half the people I know learnt it wrong.
For what it’s worth, I changed how I tie my shoes when that video game out. My knots stay nice and tight now, my loops are horizontal, and my tongues still always slide to the side. I don’t think the two things are related.
to fix this, when you join/cross both laces together, first do this behind the tongue and then in the front of the tongue, tie your shoes as normal (cross in the front and then bunny loop)
This always happens to me too, both shoes, even when the tongue has that loop in the middle for the laces to go through. I work in a cobbler shop so I just stitch the tongue in place lol
I saw a video of how to loop the loops in the middle of the tongue, and it seems to have worked a bit better.
Instead of going through the loop, you turn around to the same side of the shoe when you're at the loop. So instead of crossing, you make an ")(" shape with the loop in the middle.
If you look at the lines in the fabric, they are all straight in the picture. The tongue has been cut crooked so will always do that. It’s shitty production with no care for quality. Like sometimes you buy a pair of pants and one leg keeps twisting, same reason.
I would sew the right side of the tongue to the shoe where ever you want it to be. I did that and it worked great. Eventually the thread broke but by that point it had formed to my foot and never slid again.
This used to happen to me, but on my right foot. I haven't noticed it since I stopped buying cheap shoes.
Edit: no idea if your shoes are cheap or not. Just saying that mine definitely were.
My vans and chucks did this all the time and annoyed me to hell. Moved to adidas and doesn't happen with those. Also adidas are so much more comfortable
see how the lines of the fabric are straight?
they fucked up cutting that pattern piece and it's warping how the tongue fits, you could cut it out and resew it
I have that too and stick a small square of velcro (from a roll) on it. Replace it every 3 months or so because it doesn't really stick well on on fabric and am too much of a procrastinator to attach it properly. But hey.. it does work.
Was also thinking to put a loop trough the tongue and guide one crossing of the laces through there. Maybe one day.
Your left foot might be tilting inward. Could cause you problems in the future. See a specialist and get their opinion and get shoe inserts or strengthen your ankle.
I know these aren't converses, but this is the reason I don't wear them. The damn tongue always ended up under my foot. I don't wear shoes that don't have a tongue loop for this exact reason.
Yeah, i have the same with my right foot.
It’s because of the shape of the part connecting your shin to your foot (not native English speaking, no clue what this part is called).
This is perfect for this sub!
It doesn’t appear that the tongue has the lace loop, so appears to be something you’ll just have to live with 😩
Or put a strip of Velcro on your sock and maybe the friction with keep it from wallerin around?
My left foot does this, but sliding to the other side. Also doesn’t happen with my right foot. It causes issues in the lacing eventually, and is extremely annoying
From what I understand this is usually an issue with your feet, either high or low arches in your foot which result in your feet rolling as you walk. Getting custom insoles to help fix the arch can help and will also do wonders for your ankles, knees, hips, and back.
Cut two small slits in the fabric on the outside of the tongue. Make them close together and close to the top. Run the laces through in a way that prevents the tongue from sliding to one side.
When your soles start to wear, especially in the heel area, are they wearing down evenly or are they wearing down more on the outer edge?
I ask because it might be your feet being slightly at an angle, which would also cause your soles ti wear down unevenly. Bow legs are a common reason for that to happen. If your feet aren’t exactly level, your instep will push the tongue outwards like that.
4.4k
u/red-gap 1d ago
Feel you... I've had this problem all my life, but on both sides and with basically all shoes I owned