To B(union) or not to B(union) that’s the question….or is it.

Bunions

Yes I know it’s Sunday morning and most people are weirded out by feet especially before 8am but come on, hands up, who has a bunion??

Whose big toe is pointing inwards rather than forwards??

I have worked with numerous clients who struggle with bunions and pain around their feet and toes which the medical teams have said….”SURGERY….ITS THE ONLY OPTION…..CUT THAT FUCKER UP!!!”

Ok maybe they didn’t use that language or shout it but that’s their basic gist.

Far to often the idea is just to cut and shut things which don’t look/feel right…but what if that bunion is there for a reason?

The body is bloody clever and will not do things without a good cause or reason and when it comes to the feet, they are no exception. 

The big toe (along with every other stucture in the foot) should constantly be moving in 3 planes of motion throughout the gait cycle. There should be up and downy movements, left and righty movements and round and rounds movements (those aren’t the technical terms) 

So what if you hurt some part of the foot and it stops moving properly? Could another part of the foot start to have to move more to make up for the lack of movement in that part?

Well yes. 

The movement seen at the 1st toe joint is actually an exaggerated version of what should happen when our foot pronates (which it should do every step we take) but due to issues within the foot or body is unable to stop doing it. 

If your foot cannot probate, your body may well try one or more of a bunch of things to try to get the same loading of tissues that is required for effective efficient movement…and abduction (the big toe moving towards the second toe) is one such option it can take. 

It’s like it’s trying to say “LOOK IM PULLING THIS FUCKING TOE IN THIS DIRECTION…WHEN IS THE REST OF THE FOOT/LEG/BODY GOING TO FOLLOW!!!!”

Without use understanding the 3 dimensional movement of the foot and working to improve how the foot moves as a whole, cutting the bunion back and just pulling the toe straight NEVER gets to the root cause of the issue. So guess what, the toe returns back to the same space again asking the same question

“SERIOUSLY GUYS….LOOK IM PULLING THIS FUCKING TOE IN THIS DIRECTION FOR A LEGITIMATE REASON, LISTEN TO ME THIS TIME…WHEN IS THE REST OF THE FOOT/LEG/BODY GOING TO FOLLOW AND GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK FROM DOING ALL THE PISSING WORK DOWN HERE!!!!”

So the moral of the story is that your body is WAY cleverer than you are. Admit it, accept it and begin to learn from it. 

A bunion is there to tell you something needs to change in the way you move your feet and body. That pain it’s causing is asking you, not so politely, to take some interest in understanding how this wonder of evolution that we stroll about in works and functions and to give it some better inputs. 

If you have a bunion and you have been told that it needs surgery, before you go down that route, hit me up, surgery should always and only ever be a last resort.

Let’s work together to make you feel better in your feet so you can spread the word and we can take a whole heap of pressure off the NHS by stopping do so many needless operations. 

Remember I work in person and online both equally successfully so no reason to not let me help you learn more about your feet and get them moving better for less pain. 

"6 million adults do not do a monthly brisk 10 minute walk..."

Oh..pre-lockdown unsocially distanced walks…weren’t they just the best

4 out of 10 (41%) adults aged 40 to 60 in England walk less than 10 minutes continuously each month at a brisk pace - PUBLIC HEALTH ENGLAND!

Thats right…You read that correctly. 6 million adults aged 40-60 dont even get 10 minutes of alking in A MONTH…A FUCKING MONTH. how crazy is that?!?! This statistic is taken from the govenements own website, gov.uk.

Now there are obviously numerous health benefits to moving. We are all told about the benefits to our cardiovascular health, the reduced chance of heart attacks, strokes, raised blood pressure etc etc, but i want to bring up some ideas of moving for our skeleton.

Approximatly 5% of the uk population as a diagnosis of Osteoporosis. This is a a condition in which bones loose their strength and density and are more prone to breaking (sometimes just a sneeze can break a rib) but why do our bones become fragile?

Throughout “human” history (im talking the last million or so years) bone density was never an issue (obvs there was a lot else to worry about ) and that actually since bone scans show that our ancestors had far better bone density than we do now.

“Density remained high throughout human evolution until it decreased signigicantly in modern humans, suggesting a possible link between chaged in our skeletn and increased sedentism.”

— Habiba Chirhir, Tracy Kivell - recent origins of low reabecular bone density in modern humans. 2015

Image taken from Primate Change - Vybarr Cregan-Reid. (great book well worth a read)

So us getting cleverer with out time and ability to pass off work to machines has had a pretty massive affect on out bodies. It has meant that all the hard manual work we once would have done doesnt need to be done by hand any more. It means that we dont need to walk the 5 minutes to the shop cos we can drive.

As a species we literally evolved to walk and run..we came out of the trees and off 4 limbs and onto the african plains on two legs. we discovered the world through walking. Our hips, our spines our feet all evolved to make this our go to form of movement. Fuck exercise and the gym…we all know no one likes them things really (jokes all my gym loving buddies i know how much you guys really do haha) but walking is the greatest tool at your disposal to help load your bones. yes loading with weights is helpful but your own body weight is more than enough, you just need to give it a good old go.

Start with 5 minutes walk a day. thats basically around the block right?!?! thats totally doable, right?

After a week and when your bored of those views up it to 10 minutes. Thats like 1/3 of an episode of friend/scrubs/insert favourite sitcom...Nothing Ay?!?!

“Everything Needs to move”

— Gary Ward - Anatomy In Motion

Just remember that while pretty much EVERY fit person has to will themselves to get up and at it, our whole body does need to move and be loaded. We as a species have not evolved to want to “exercise”. Traditionally Its a massive waste of hard fought for energy (im talkimg hunter gatherer era humans here) and so why the fuck would they walk/run/jump/climb/build muscle in excess, when they needed all the energy from their catch to last them till their next meal.

Also remember that its NORMAL to want to take the lift/esculator rather than the stairs..but again, our whole body NEEDS TO MOVE, just start looking at these movements as your free gym. Fuck going and getting all sweaty on a treadmill, just take your body for a walk and pay attention to it. Go slow and steady and let it build up and adapt to the new loads (this is important and as humans our egos tell us we can do that…what ever that is….most of the time it cant and then you get put off doing it again when everything starts to ache and hurt.)

If you need to, come see me or another AiM practioner to ge your feet and legs moving as they should and enjoy moving your own body again. Its amazing the difference you will feel and how much you will enjoy it when things move as they should

Why dont we look at this whole 2020 lockdown bullshit as the perfect oppertunity to get out of the house for small little walks and strolls and to get back in touch with ourselves and with nature. Why not also take your shoes off and walk about barefoot in the grass..let all them nerves in the feet actually feel something. you won’t regret it.

This barefoot life

So blog time about being barefoot. As a lot, if not all, of you know i have been completely barefoot for the last 7 months. This seems to get a whole lot of weird looks and constant questions as to why. I write this blog from the perspective of a yoga teacher and nurse who spends their life dealing with people with maybe some sort of knee valgus/varus issues, pain in the feet, hips, back. Tension and cramping in the feet and shins and hips, with a lack of mobility to even find the most basic of movements such as a hindi squat (the resting pose of pretty much 3/4 of the world population.) allowing the base of our body, the foundation of the structure we call "us" to do its job properly can have a massive impact of all sorts of pain and structure issues.

While there is probably about enough material for a book rather than a blog to be written on this subject, i while keep this fairly basic and short....(Psssst there are actually books written about this very subject, and written much more concisely than i ever could, hence me not writing one.....see in particular Katy Bowmans whole body barefoot and simple steps to foot pain relief) 

The feet and ankles make up 1/4 of the moving body

So as the picture above shows, there is a hell of a lot going on with each foot. 33 joints per side, so even without a decent maths GCSE (i did it 4 times haha) thats 66 joints JUST IN THE FEET ALONE. Your spine has also 33 but only 24 actually move, while 9 fuse as we become adults. Now just think about how important it is all those spinal facets are moving and gliding over each other as they should. As soon as they stop there is all sorts of pain and discomfort felt through out the whole body, not just the back. Well guess what, your feet are no different, in fact in many ways they are almost more important as they are your foundations, they are what your entire Bipedal structure is built off just them. This doesn't even account for the 200,000+ nerve ending that are in the feet.

So briefly, i have been transitioning to being barefoot since around 2012 when i got my first pair of vibrato 5 fingers and since that time have just gotten to the stage where it just seemed a lot of work to put shoes on to just go to the shops, so now i have stopped. A lot of the questions i get asked are...Q: doesn't it hurt to ask on stones/concrete/acorns/whatever, just insert word there. A: is no....your feet are pretty amazing things, and the more you use them as they were designed to be used the more they get used to it. All those 66 joints suddenly start to find life that has been lost through wearing shoes (to use Katy Bowman's expression, shoes act as plater casts for our feet) al those nerves suddenly being to understand how lumps and bumps and digits and acorns are suppose to feel and so your feet begin to mould around the environment your are you. you begin to walk and step lighter, using your feet to feel your away through your walk. below is a video of me running barefoot across walberswick beach with my pups a couple of weeks back.

A few other questions i get asked would be things like Q: What Happens if you stand on something sharp and it gets infected? A: I look where i am going and i don't stand on anything so nothing gets infected. Q: What if you stand in dog poo (always ALWAYS the favourite to ask) A:i wipe and wash it off. exactly as you would do if you were wearing shoes, only it comes off that much easier...those waffle grip Vans are a bastard to get it out of. Q:Dont you care what other people think of you being barefoot??  A: If you know me at all then thats a simple one...No, people only care about how other people perceive them...if all you are worrying about is "will Fred and Jane think i am weird if i don't wear shoes" than your concerns are clearly aimed in the wrong place with the world as it is right now. Learn to be happy as you are in your self...maybe thats wearing shoes, but also make sure you learn and understand the issues that comes from wearing shoes/heels and the problems they can create (hello bunions)

Working with the Ipswich Town football players over the last 10 weeks has been a real eye opener as to what feet look like, even at a young ages, when you live in boots with a tight toe box. Toes squished together, metatarsal phalangeal joint enlargement (evening causing bunions) and toes which don't want to move as they should. The video above was filmed and shows Adam webster, Tom Adeyemi and Tommy Smith all playing with lifting the big toe and keeping the others on the floor and then web lifting the 3 middle toes and keeping the big one down. Great exercises to bring some of that neuro-plasticity back and remind those feet what they are capable of. Using th tennis balls to roll your feet on is also a great way to re-awaken the tissues in the nerves in the feet without beating the crap out of them like you would do if you used a golf ball...you aren't trying to "break down" any tissues or anything but just remind your feet what it is like to be awake, to be alive.

So if you are looking for shoes to wear there are a growing number of them on the market that make barefoot stuff shoes, the main two I've used and can vouch for are Vibram (they make the "crazy" 5 finger style glove shoes which you need to be happy with your self and not care about being seen as even weirder than being barefoot) and Vivobarefoot who make some pretty stylish nice shoes. like i say there are many brands these days and they are all trying to make the idea of wearing a shoe as close to being barefoot as possible. They have A wide toe box, a thin sole and a neutral heel rise. Traditional shoes pretty much constantly have a raised heel, and no i don't just mean girls and your high heels (or guys if you like). Your running shoe has a raised and padded heel to "take out the impact" that running causes through heel plant running. Go for a run barefoot and your body will not allow that style of running cos it bloody hurts so you shift to a mid foot running technique without even trying, your body just knows how it should run in nature. i wont go into the depths of running shod/barefoot and actually your body is great at adapting either way but if you are struggling with pain and injuries maybe its something you should think about. 

So to conclude, Whilst i am at the extreme end of the whole barefoot thing and i wouldn't expect, though i would love, people to suddenly start walking everywhere barefoot, i do hope that maybe you might look at the ideas behind being barefoot and trying to do it more often. The reason i do it is to find a greater understanding and comfort in my own body.  One of the reasons for this could be so that tescos don't kick up a stink when ever i walk in there (apparently its unhygienic being in there barefoot...even more so than the shoes that have never been washed) There are said to be calming benefits to walking on grass barefoot so maybe even just start there and slowly try to build up walking on your pea shingle drive, i shouldn't use these words as tescos quite often try to kick me out, but every little helps. You won't end up with super hard feet the whole soul of the foot adapts and just becomes harder wearing. If you have any questions about such things, feel free to drop me a line, this has already been WAY to long, but i will leave you with a clip of what your feet can be capable of if you used them like they can be used everyday