Medial Heel Skive
A ramped medial wedge ground into the heel cup that increases the supination moment at the heel to resist strong pronation.
How it works
The medial heel skive (the Kirby skive) reshapes the heel seat into a subtle medial ramp. That ramp shifts the point where the shell pushes back on the calcaneus, increasing the supination moment across the subtalar joint axis: leverage exactly where a strongly pronating foot needs it.
Because the correction lives inside the heel cup rather than under the shell, it delivers aggressive pronation control without raising the heel or adding bulk to the shoe. That's often the difference-maker in feet that run straight through a standard arch and post.
When to prescribe it
- Strong, flexible pronation that overwhelms standard posting
- Pediatric flexible flatfoot
- Posterior tibial tendon dysfunction (early stage)
- A medially deviated subtalar joint axis
- Sinus tarsi pain from end-range eversion
How we build it
You choose the skive depth and we cut it digitally into the heel cup of the modeled shell: a perfectly smooth ramp, matched to the patient's heel width, with none of the variability of grinding plaster. Depth is repeatable to the millimeter on remakes.