Let’s talk about feet!
Our feet are phenomenal pieces of biomechanical engineering consisting of 26 bones, 33 joints and over one hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments. All of these structures work together to create and absorb force, resulting in us being able to go for a run, play hockey or balance on our tip toes whilst reaching for the biscuits at the top of the cupboard.
Assuming that you’re not shuffling around on all fours (or even more impressively, walking on your hands) during your day to day life, our feet are our primary contact with the world around us. Therefore, our feet have a huge capacity to provide sensory feedback to our brain, to let it know what the rest of the body needs to do!
This sensory feedback (and foot function in general) can be affected by lots of things: footwear, previous injury, circulation, presence of pain, stress levels, how much sleep you’ve had, activity levels…and the list can go on. Barring pain (which is often the most limiting factor of function in any part of the body), one of the most common factors I see affecting foot function is footwear.
So let’s talk a bit about footwear, if we wear narrow shoes with lots of cushioning then this can impact how well our feet can sense the floor, and subsequently how they respond to what they feel. Imagine wearing thick gloves that squish your fingers close together and trying to do some gardening, you can’t really feel what you’re grabbing or how hard you’re grabbing it and next thing you know you’ve sheared the cat instead of the hedge. The same principle applies to our feet. Our feet need to be able to feel the surface of the floor, how much force we are putting into the floor and which part of our foot is in contact with the floor in order to know what muscles to use and how strongly to use them.
I’m not quite suggesting we all throw our shoes away and walk around barefoot. If we go back to our gardening analogy, taking off gloves completely would probably end up leaving us with a thorn or two in our hands and maybe some bite marks from an angry cat. A happy medium would probably be some relatively thin gloves that protect us from the environment whilst also allowing our hands to move freely and feel what they’re doing. So, the shoe equivalent of this would be a pair of shoes with a relatively thin sole and a nice wide toe box to allow our feet to spread out as we weight bear.
As always, there are individual nuances and caveats that can’t be accounted for in this short blog post, and some people might end up feeling worse jumping straight from a lifetime of wearing pillows on their feet to wearing 2mm thin soles. For some people, I might never recommend wearing minimalist shoes at all! But, as a general rule, our feet like to feel what they’re doing and have ample space to be able to flatten out a little bit as we move.
If you have any questions about your foot mechanics or ankles, book in with Ashley today.