How much attention do you give your feet? Walking is one of the most necessary and fundamental movements we do as humans. Yet very few people give their feet the time and attention they need to enable functional and productive walking…for the duration of their life!
As a consequence, many people suffer from foot pain, which leads to an inability to walk effectively or even at all.
Why does foot pain happen? And how can you take proactive action and avoid foot issues and improve your walking capability?
Below are the top 3 reasons people get foot pain and how you can avoid them.
SHOES
We all need to wear them but are your shoes helping your feet or hindering them? Any shoe with an elevated heel will change your foot posture and how your feet hit the ground. This starts a postural chain reaction all the way up to your head!
Wearing dress shoes that elevate the heel and squash your toes really is a form of torture for your feet! Sure, they might look good, but you’re severely disrupting the natural way your entire body is meant to move, not just your feet.
The human foot should have space between the toes, a broad forefoot, a strong and flexible arch and a grounded heel. We’re born with perfect feet!
What’s the solution?
Over the past few decades, there has been big movement called…minimalist shoes.
These shoes are designed to enhance the natural movement and posture of the foot. Instead of your foot having to adapt to a weird and torturous shoe, minimalist shoes are designed to fit the foot we were born with.
So review your shoe collection and decide which ones need to go and educate yourself on how to transition to minimalist shoes.
WEAK & STIFF FEET
The human foot is incredibly complex. Each foot is made up of 26 bones, 30 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments, all of which work together to provide support, balance and mobility.
Like any other part of the body, they need strength training, they need to be stretched and all those joints need to be moved.
Feet get weak and stiff for a couple of reasons.
The type of shoes you wear will impact how active your feet are when you walk. A traditional exercise shoe is designed to limit the amount of interaction the foot has with the ground and limit the amount of work the foot has to do.
Secondly, not many people do specific strength training for their feet and underestimate their importance for the posture of the entire body.
One of the foundation principles of the pilates exercise method of exercise is to develop every muscle in the body so it can be capable of doing what is was designed to do and contribute to movement capability of the entire body.
This includes all the muscles of the feet.
Learning how to strengthen, mobilise and stretch your feet is one of the most valuable skills you can learn for lifelong movement capability.
DEAD FEET
Proprioception is a long word that you should learn to understand. It’s sometimes called the sixth sense of the body.
It is the unconscious ability your body has to sense its location, movements, and actions. It’s the reason we’re able to move freely without consciously thinking about our environment.
We rely on proprioception to navigate our environment and react quickly to any changes that might take place.
While we need proprioception in all of our joints, it is especially important to have good proprioception in the feet, because they are the first contact point that we have to the ground.
This means that they play a critical role in balance and reaction time. For example, being able to sense where your feet are allows you to walk with ease and stop yourself from falling, if for example, you happen to trip on a step.
However, if you wear shoes that hinder foot movement, limit your contact with the ground and you have weak and stiff feet, you lose foot proprioception.
This results in a reduction in reaction times, and movement confidence decreases. You feel like you need to look at the ground to place your foot and feel like you have poor balance.
The feet become dead to the natural sixth sense they possess.
What do most people do about this? They go out and buy shoes that “support” the foot, which has already been outlined above, actually causes the feet to become weaker and less capable and potentially can cause issues and pain.
It’s never too late to get your feet fit, strong, healthy and pain free. Here at Pilates Plus we want to change how people think about aging so they have a high quality of movement capability and enjoyment of life. And this is what the pilates exercise method does beautifully.
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