Balance and posture need to be better? Here’s one simple drill that can fix both. We’re going to talk today about a deceptively simple idea called heel walking. There’s nothing really complicated about it conceptually. You pick your toes up and you walk. You do that for about 20 meters and you come back. You know, you can do it backwards as well. It seems deceptively simple, but it actually is a profoundly useful drill. Let me explain why.
Whenever we look into the research around balance, we look into the research around fall prevention, we look around, look into the research on athletic performance. One of the consistent issues that rears this ugly head is that a loss of an ability to dorsiflex the ankle can be detrimental to basically everything related to upright movement in humans, as well as posture. People didn’t think of posture as, hey, a static position. Well, posture isn’t a static position. It’s actually an ongoing dynamic communication process between your feet and your brain. So if your feet are dumb, they are weak, they are stiff, or your ankles are the same, guess what? Your brain’s not getting great information and it will create tension in your body to protect you. But whenever we go into more tension, we often lose the capacity to perform well.
So this is one of the first things that I will actually look at for basically everyone I work with, whether an athlete, an older person that I’m concerned about falling, we need to see how well can they dorsiflex and can they maintain that. Once we have an idea of their movement capacity in the ankle, we want to start giving them simple drills to do that are going to strengthen them, going to improve their brain’s mapping of their ankle, and also will actually, from when we look at what happens in research, shows good results. And for, again, one of these is heel walking.
So here’s the deal. Whenever we do heel walking, we are going to ask the tibialis anterior, which is the primary muscle responsible for pulling our toes up toward our knee, to become more active. Most people, whenever we see all these kinds of deficits in posture and movement, if we test their tibialis anterior in isolation, it may test okay the first time, but whenever we really load it multiple times, maybe we do a muscle test on that tibialis anterior 20 times in a row, it quickly begins to fatigue. So we need to make sure that we are building strength and endurance in that area, as well as remapping it for the brain.
Now, before I go show you the exercise, really quickly, if you are a movement professional, a doctor, a therapist, or a coach, you work with movement of any kind, whether that’s yoga, Pilates, CrossFit, you teach tennis, you work with soccer players, it doesn’t really matter to us. If you work with movement and you’re interested in blending modern neuroscience into what you do, check out our YouTube description, click the link there, you can schedule a call because we’d love to share with you more about our curriculum.
All right, so this, again, really simple idea, heel walking. All that I’m going to ask the client to do is stand. Now, if their balance is really compromised, you may need to have them hold onto a wall, but all that they have to do is elevate both toes, or the toes of both feet, and you want them to walk. I will typically ask people to walk somewhere between 10 and 20 meters, depending on their general competence level, and I’m watching for a lot of things as I do this.
What you will often see is as soon as people lift their toes, they will flex forward. We don’t want them doing that. As much as possible, you say, okay, I want you to push your head up to the ceiling, lift your toes, try to maintain a normal upright gait as you are walking. Now, obviously I’m kind of in a short space here. You can take short steps, but it is also okay to take longer steps as long as they’re able to do it.
As a coach, again, don’t let them make massive postural shifts in order for this to happen, because if my tibialis anterior are weak, guess what? I try to lift them and I’m like, I’ll lean forward to help myself. If you can’t stand up, lift your toes up and walk. We may actually have to go backwards and do a little bit of isolation work just to get your ankles mobile and for you to build enough strength to actually perform this exercise.
Here’s the thing. Eventually, this has to become a key piece of what they do. Sitting on a chair, using a band to strengthen your tibialis anterior is one thing. Using it in gait is a much more neurologically complex process. Ultimately, anything you do in the feet, we need to reintegrate into gait. This is one of the easiest ways to do it. Like I said, walk forward, walk back, have them do side steps, whatever they can do while maintaining that activation tibialis anterior is going to be huge for them going forward. As I said, it’s also really interesting to me because I have seen this change posture more quickly than almost anything else I’ve had people do, because whenever we create this kind of mild disruption, the brain automatically has to adjust spinal stacking. It is a fantastic way to fix a lot of stuff with one drill that takes about 90 seconds.
Again, if you’re a movement pro, you’re interested in applied neuroscience, how to blend that into what you do, go to our YouTube description, click the link, schedule a call with us. We’d love to chat.
