Do You Need Shoe Inserts?
By Henrick Norremark
Do You Need Shoe Inserts? Wrong Question
Walk into any pharmacy and you'll find a wall of insoles — foam ones, gel ones, ones that claim to target a dozen different conditions. It's a reasonable place to get stuck: how do you know if any of it is actually for you, or if you're better off going without?
Here's a more useful question than "do I need inserts": how much of your day happens on flat, hard, unforgiving ground? For most people, the answer is "almost all of it" — and that's the thing worth addressing, regardless of which aisle you were standing in when you asked.
The Real Question Isn't About a Condition
Most shelf inserts are built around a specific complaint — plantar fasciitis, flat feet, general foot pain — and sold as if the foot itself is what needs fixing. But the mechanism behind most of that discomfort isn't really about any one condition. It's about what your heel does the instant it lands.
Your heel doesn't rotate straight up-and-down or straight side-to-side — it twists on a diagonal, two directions at once, more like a screw thread than a simple tilt. On natural, uneven ground, that twist has somewhere to go. On pavement, tile, concrete — the surfaces most of us stand and walk on all day — there's nothing for it to rotate against. That unresolved motion doesn't disappear. It gets redistributed onto whatever tissue is nearest and available to absorb it: the plantar fascia, the Achilles, the muscles up the back of the leg. Different people feel it in different places, but it's frequently the same root cause.
Most foam and gel inserts don't address any of this — they compress evenly under the whole foot, which helps with impact but does nothing about that rotational twist. That's the honest gap in the "cushioning" pitch: comfort and mechanics are two different problems.
So — Do You Need Something?
If most of your day happens on flat, hard, man-made ground — which describes nearly everyone in a modern shoe, most of the time — your foot is dealing with this mismatch whether or not you've ever felt a specific symptom from it. That's a mechanical fact about the ground you're standing on, not a diagnosis.
If you already have a specific, ongoing pain — in your feet, knees, or back — that's worth a conversation with a doctor or podiatrist before you buy anything off a shelf, since only they can rule out something that needs its own treatment.
What Actually Addresses the Mismatch
Landing Gear's heel cup is shaped to match that diagonal twist directly — built to guide your heel through it at the moment it lands, rather than just cushioning the impact afterward. In independent 3D motion capture testing (BioMechanica LLC, Dr. Martyn Shorten, 2019, n=31), 28 of 31 people landed with their heel rotating inside the correct range wearing Landing Gear's M-100, compared to far fewer in standard foam. Same feet, same shoes, same floor — the only thing that changed was the shape under the heel.
That's the actual difference between "an insert that cushions" and "an insert that addresses the mechanics" — and it's the difference worth understanding before you pick anything off that pharmacy shelf.