Foot pain, foot cramps, or knee pain, you may need stronger feet.
Whenever we look at issues that are often overlooked in typical training programs, we often see people that have a lot of issues with what are called intrinsic foot muscles, but they don’t know how to train them, they don’t know what to do with them, they don’t know how to assess them. The basics are this. If someone comes to you and they say, hey, my feet get tired really easily, I get foot cramps, a lot of times we focus on mobilizing the feet. That’s cool, right? There’s lots of foot mobility exercises. We teach probably 50 different foot mobilizations, but often we forget that we also need to strengthen the feet, and many of the exercises that are out there, I think, are less useful or less beneficial than the ones that I’m going to show you. I’m going to show you just two today, but whenever you actually understand these, you understand why and how to do them and how they work, I think these are going to become favorites in your training program.
Now, whenever we talk about the feet, obviously everything about us depends on these things if we are able to use our feet, right? They’re going to form the foundation for everything that we do in terms of movement, anything we do in terms of athleticism, if we are just walking and trying not to fall over, guess what? Your feet have to be smart, and what has happened over the last probably 30 years with the advent of the amazing athletic shoe is that we’ve gotten more and more technologically advanced shoes which have turned our feet more dumb. Our feet have become less smart because we cushion them and we take care of them in such a way that we often lose sensory capacity, and more importantly, we also lose strength.
So what you need to do for yourself and for your clients, first of all, is you need to test sensation in the feet. You need to check whether or not they can feel light touch. Use a vibration tool. Can they feel vibration equally on each of the toes and on the top of the foot and the bottom of the foot? If someone has foot pain, foot cramps, fatigues easily, they have knee pain, hip pain, back pain, one foot or the other will not have great sensation.
So the first thing you have to do is you have to start doing some of that. Teach them to do it at home. Teach them to rub their feet. Teach them to mobilize their feet manually. Use vibration tools. Use warm and cool. I have lots of other videos on all that stuff, and obviously we have a whole training program just covering sensation because you can try and fix movement, but if you don’t fix sensation, you’re only fixing half of the problem.
And now having said that, if you are a movement professional, a coach, a therapist, doctor, you work with any kind of movement person from yoga to Pilates to athletics, and you’re interested in learning more about applied neuroscience, blending it with what you know, go to our YouTube description, click the link there. I just scheduled a call with us because we’d love to chat with you.
All right, so now we’ve talked a little bit about sensation. Your feet are incredibly important to your brain, right? You can even look at what are called homunculi, maps of body areas and how they show up in the brain. Your feet are really big in comparison to, let’s say, your entire leg. That means that your brain pays a lot of attention to what’s going on there. So you have to make sure that you’re getting good sensation, number one, and number two, you have to supply some better motor skills. The two exercises that we have found hugely effective in improving, again, particularly foot pain, knee pain, the first one is just a basic toe spreading exercise.
So what I have people do, I’m going to have you sit down first. It will help if you spend about 30 seconds just separating your toes manually. You can also use toe spacers or whatever, but we want to make sure that your brain has an idea of what your toes feel like when they’re not crunched together but spread apart. You’re now going to try to create that yourself, utilizing your intrinsic foot muscles. So you’re here, you have your foot relaxed. You try to, if you can, squeeze your toes together and then spread them apart. Now, normally when I ask people to spread them apart, in the beginning I will say it is okay if you want to extend your toes. Try to open your toes and then lay them down individually, all right? That is usually the easiest way for people to begin working on this. If I ask you to just sit there and, you know, adduct your big toe, a lot of people will struggle with that. They’ll go, that is impossible. It’s not impossible, it’s just something your foot can’t do because you haven’t trained it. If you’re barefoot most of the time, you’d be able to do it. This is something we’ve seen over and over and over, not only in people that focus on barefoot shoes and barefoot work in the United States, but around the world. So this is something that often gets lost whenever we wear good shoes, all right?
So we need to be able to spread those toes as much as possible. Typically, what I’m asking you to do is about 10 repetitions of that spread, hold it as long as it’s comfortable, and then relax, squeeze back together, and spread. Now, when you’re doing the spread, it is very possible that you will cramp. If you cramp, go ahead and relax, rub that out, and then lightly go back to it, all right? Obviously, you’re going to have some muscles that aren’t used to this kind of work, so that is going to be something that’s important to do. After you’ve done the toe spreading, the next thing you want to do is a little, what I call monkey grab exercise. We call it toe flexions and extension waves, but that’s a little technical. So think of a monkey grabbing something, all right? So I’m going to put my foot out. Typically, I’ll do it in the air. I’m going to begin with my toes pulled up toward my knee, full dorsiflexion. I’m also going to extend my toes, and then I’m going to start up my toes, and I’m going to imagine I’m grabbing something, right? I’m grabbing a ball. I’m going to hold that ball with my toes and then my arch, and then I’m going to push down toward the floor, and then I’m going to release it, all right? So grab all the way down and release. Once again, you may cramp. If you cramp, it tells you that you need to do some of this. You need to do a little more of it.
Then we need to do the reverse. So I’m going to begin with my toes pointed, my ankles down, my toes are pointed. I’m going to grab the ball. I’m now going to hold onto the ball as my toes are pulled up toward my knee, and then I let go of the ball, all right? Grab it, pull up toward the knee, and release it. If you can take and do each of these exercises three to five seconds in each direction, aim for about 10 reps, I guarantee you when you get up to walk, your feet are going to feel completely different. Again, foot pain, knee pain, and honestly, if you have clients that have low back issues, they have postural issues, this is a fantastic starting point.
We talk a lot about in neurology, what are high payoff areas of the body in terms of creating fast change that also lasts? And guess what? The feet are one of the very first places that we look in virtually every case because it is just that powerful, all right?
So give these exercises a shot. Put them into your programming. You will tend to see more and more results from these over two to four weeks of practice. This is stuff that you can do every single day unless the foot gets really, really sore. So don’t depend on one session being enough, all right? You’re going to have to do this over and over, but as you begin applying it, you’ll get better and better at it, and then you can begin loading it, doing standing, adding, again, weight vest or other stuff, do it single leg, or the more you practice this, the faster it’s going to get better, the faster you can load it, the more you will then be able to carry it over in everything that you do, all right?
So again, if you are a movement professional, a doctor, therapist, coach of any kind, you work with people that move for a living, and you’re interested in blending neuroscience into what you do, go to our YouTube description, click the link there, or schedule a call with us because we’d love to chat with you.
