When it comes to human movement the feet are integral to how we move. Clearly they are our connection with the ground (when standing). Toes need to be able to move collectively or independently. Shoes are useful but on essential. Natural lifestyle coach Tony Riddle ran from one end of great Britain to the other barefoot, that’s 874 miles!! Clearly he had conditioned his feet to do this before attempting the feat! However, anything is possible when you put your mind to it.
Foot function is crucial to the rest of the body in terms of movement. A great way to keep your feet moving well are as follows:
- Try picking up a pen with your feet/toes un assisted
- Try lifting your big toes while keeping the other 4 on the ground, then to the opposite, lift the other 4 keeping the big toe down.
- Try drawing your toes towards your heel without ‘clawing’ your toes under, they must remain flat on the ground as you draw them backwards.
This image is a great eye opener to how we expect our feet to live day to day depending on our choice of shoe. High heels also force the heel off the ground shortening the distance between the heel and the hip. When you then go to do something sporting like run or play tennis in a flatter shoe, muscles and the connective tissue is expected to just lengthen on command which can lead to injury like snapped achillies tendons – a horrific injury which takes a while to heal.
Bunching those toes up into tight shoes also makes for potential bunions and toes need more room than that. If you look at the big toe in the ladies shoe above you can see she has a bunion where her big toe has drifted inwards and leaving the joint exposed. This can had an impact on gait – how we run and walk, so finding shoes that give our feet more room to move naturally is a preferred option. Toes spacers are a useful tool if you are looking to give your toes more room to get used to being straight as opposed to bunched up at the end of your shoe.
In summer we spend much more time out of shoes than in them. The warmer months mean that we get on the beach and use the feet the way they were intended. Keeping this going during winter is not so easy, but if you have a desire to keep those intrinsic foot muscles healthy and working then barefoot time in winter is just as important. Get out of those work shoes and spend some time walking around on different surfaces so that your feet are exposed to lots of different stimuli.
We have over 200,000 nerve endings in our feet, which are there to pass information back to the brain about the ground beneath us. If we remain in shoes 24/7 (bar sleep) we end up preventing the sensory world meeting our feet and the sensitivity of our feet usually goes down. We lose the ability to define what is under our feet. ‘Sensory deprivation chambers’ is one of the names given to shoes and I think that’s fair. Imagine wearing gloves all day every day and then expecting your hands to have the fine motors skills to screw in a light bulb or paint your finger nails – it would be a difficult task I suspect.
So give your feet some love and let them free whenever you can. They will thank you for it, giving you better movement and freer movement in all the things that you want to do…