Health and Wellness Footwear is becoming increasingly popular. The footwear industry has recognised it as one of the fastest growing sectors of the industry, the amount of people who own a pair of health and wellness shoes is rapidly growing, the press love the topic and even celebrities are jumping on the idea that the type of footwear you chose can have a direct impact on health, wellness, weight loss, toning, cellulite and fitness

Here is our explanation of the different types of Health and Wellness Footwear brands:

• Although most Health and Wellness Footwear brands have a number of different benefits, you can generally split them in to the following categories based on their main benefits:
  • Fitness and Exercise Footwear
  • Comfort Footwear
  • Medical Footwear

• Fitness and Exercise Footwear is a very popular category with consumers and developers. Fitness and Exercise Footwear when considered in the Health and Wellness category will include a specific technology that offers benefits such as increased flexibility, enhanced toning benefits or technology devised to combat cellulite. A lot of fitness and exercise footwear brands will have clinical studies carried out on their products and technologies to ensure they do provide the benefits they claim. A lot of them also base their technologies on the practises of Yoga and Pilates.
• Comfort footwear is a huge footwear category that has been around for years, and as the trend of Health and Wellness Footwear grows it has naturally been included under the umbrella. As such, most traditional comfort brands don’t include a ‘technology’, they simply offer soft leathers or a wide foot bed. However, there is a new breed of comfort footwear that has been developed as part of the Health and Wellness Footwear trend. The brands that make this type of comfort footwear invest heavily in research and development to come up with innovative ways to make shoes more comfortable. Some of the most recent developments include Stitch and Turn, On Air Technology and Soleplex Technology.
• Medical Footwear is a category of Health and Wellness Footwear that can help with specific medical conditions. Most Health and Wellness Footwear brands do have benefits that can ease medical conditions such as back pain, poor posture, and foot pain. These brands have specific technologies that usually help align our bodies and support the joints properly, or have a specially designed foot bed to ease foot pain.  Some brands are developed specifically as a solution for medical conditions and are usually connected with the NHS and other health practitioners. MBT is an example of a specific medical shoe and as such it only available from special shoe fitters.