The importance of your feet for whole body health

Vibram 5 fingers, love them or hate them, they’ve got your attention, Let’s talk feet.

Feet are amazing and totally under appreciated in the world of rehabilitation, strength and conditioning, running, cycling, walking, health and life. 

Yeah I said it. All those things. Taking care of your feet and allowing them to move as they have evolved to move (sorry fundamentalist Christians) can have life changing affects on how you experience the world and your chosen activities.

Did you know there are 26 bones and 33 joints with EACH foot. That’s basically 1/6 of all the joints and over 1/4 of the bones in your body in two feet. How you stand on them is important, in fact its key to moving your whole body well.

I bet you never considered how complex your feet were. 

Now if they are that complex do you think it could be for a reason?!? Do you think those bones should be able to articulate with one another?? Do you think yours do?! If so I’ve got some bad news. Pretty everyone who comes to see me has feet that do not move well at all. My teacher, the badass @garyward_aim has a set of 5 big rules of motion. I’m guna mention the first 2.

1. Muscles lengthen before they contract

2. Joints act, muscles react

So, if we look at the foot joints being “stuck”, “stagnant”, “not moving” then how can we expect the 20 odd muscles of the foot to be loaded/unloaded, to move blood from the feet back up the body along with lymph, to experience there full ranges and be capable of handling whatever loads we through at them.
It’s imperative for whole body health and movement that we can allow the join within the foot to move as this will Allow the muscles to be taken from centre, to their end ranges in all 3 planes of motion as the muscles and tissues are lengthened and shortened.

We will discuss this idea of why moving our feet is important for whole body health in more detail tomorrow. But I’m the mean time take your shoes off, give your feet a bit of attention and love and just stand and feel your feet. 

Pay attention to them in a standing position and feel where you are most connected to the ground…left or right foot?? Inside or outside?!? Balls (of feet 🤣😜) or heels?!? 

Take a few minutes to scan your feet and make a bit of that, we can see what happens over time, see if that changes 🙌🏻🙌🏻. 

Why I went from being a nurse to a yoga teacher.

Life on the front line in Accident and Emergency as a nurse

Having been a nurse for 10 years ish, I had really started to get fed up with seeing the short sighted way patients were treated within the hospital/general practice. I had spent half my career in coronary care and half in accident and emergency and I always felt as if we were trying to shut the gate after the horse had bolted (or what ever the saying is.)

Now I understand that by the time people get into hospital teaching people to understand their health and physiology is too late, but it inspired me to want to help prevent people having to get to the stage of being in hospital. There are a whole bunch of things that we can’t do a whole bunch about with our health (environment toxins, genetic variability etc), but there is also so so so so much that can be done to improve your chances of living a happy and healthy life. 

One of the biggest things I notice is the amount of people who come into hospital chronically, overly mouth breathing. It is now seen as normal for people to have a respiratory rate (amount of times breathing in and out a minute) of 20.

Yoga teaches us, through the practice of pranayama, to be able to slow our breathing and find self awareness. When we slow our breathing and use our noses in particular, there is/should be  a knock on effect which slows our heart rates and lowers our blood pressure (and can even help control blood sugars for you diabetics too) Cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the western world these days and having higher bloody pressure and heart rates will play a major part in this (hence why you get prescribed medication to help lower both) 

A slower life of stillness in yoga

Pranayama teaches us to become far more aware of being present and in the moment which helps to alleviate feelings of stress and anxiety which also increase our risk of cardiovascular disease. In todays modern busy go go go society, stress and anxiety have become ubiquitous and something that many actually look on like a badge of honour. In my eyes this really really needs to change. Stress causing anxiety and panic attacks can play havoc with mental health and is becoming increasingly common, especially among teens and younger adults. There is a physiological reason stress can cause people to panic and cause anxiety which if understood can be leveraged to bring back a sense of calm and inner peace

Yoga isn’t exactly a panacea for all lifestyle conditions, I have realised many things in yoga miss out a lot on an understanding of modern physiology but there is so much that we as health professionals could learn from the world of yoga .

So if you are someone who is worrying about there health or have been told they need to start looking after themselves, finding a decent yoga teacher that has a decent understanding of movement, breathing and the physiology behind them, can be a great place to start. I have tried to just highlight a little bit about how the breathing side of yoga can play a crucial roll in taking control of your own lifestyle and health, there is another essay that can be written about the joy that can come from the physical aspect of asana (yoga poses) but I will save that for another day.

If you are interested in learning more about yoga/breath work and health why not sign up for our news letter and our online membership at https://www.mandukyayoga.com/become-a-member (the news letter sign up will appear as a pop up) where you can have access to 11 weekly classes of movement, yoga, Breathwork and meditation all for £15 a month with both myself and my beautiful wife Jenny, who is also a long standing nurse with backgrounds in vascular care, accident and emergency and much more

Improving posture and gait in traumatic brain injury…using Anatomy in Motion.

The wonders of understand the human body and movement through the lens of @garyward_aim and his anatomy in motion lens.

This week I started working with a client who suffered a traumatic brain injury after falling three floors  from a roof.

The Left Hemisphere Traumatic Brain Injury left him with Right Sided Ataxia (A Loss of the ability to coordinate muscular movement )along Painful and slow walking for 21 years.

When we explored what his feet were doing on the floor, how he stood and walked there were some pretty key things happening that would affect his balance. 

Getting his foot tripod on the floor was a big one and allowing the joints to move as they have evolved to suddenly have him a strong, deep grounded sensation. 

He could also actually balance on his foot which he said he hasn’t since his accident. 

If a brain is to maybe relearn lost movements, perhaps we need to change the lens through which we rehab them. 

Gary ward has 5 big rules, one of which is that rather than looking at the body in a way that muscles move joints, we get the joints to move the muscles. 

How does that even work?? We all know that the muscles pull on the bones to move the joints right??

Well perhaps yes, while we are working out, trying to get fit and strong, but in gait, as we walk, no. 

Take 20 seconds right now to stand up, close your eyes and just observe yourself in space. 

Observe how you cannot stand still.

Observe how you drift forward/back/left/right

All without having any control, your joints are moving/swaying/falling with gravity and you muscles are reacting to hold you upright.

This is the same principle we put into practice when working with our lens turned to see through anatomy in motion.

If someone, say this clients, balance/gait is hideous and we just say it’s due to his accident and tough shit, but don’t dig down, we are doing ourselves and them a disservice by not looking into some fundamentals of how perhaps we are reacting with our environment 

This clients feet, had compensated to his new way of walking such that he was on the outside of one foot with his toes gripping the floor, holding his tripod away from the ground.

The optimal tripod is when we have out 1st/5th metatarsals and our heel all firming connected neurologically with the ground. If just the big toe rather than the metatarsal head is grounding, it can throw the whole body off.

Because of this, he always felt as if he was standing/walking on a thin blade of his foot, Making walking, standing balancing feel off balance, uncomfortable and unsafe.

By allowing the bones to move the muscle, using AIM wedges, by getting the client to relax and try to do less, the foot bones did the only thing they could really do and following the joints shapes they have.

As the joint surfaces in the foot glide over one another properly, the muscles attached to them will have no choice BUT to lengthen, causing them to slow the movement and pull those joints away from their end range.

This is really where, in this kind of brain injury, I would suggest the best changes can be made. By not making the body try to move but by allowing the body to move itself so that all those tissues are just lengthen to slow movement down naturally to return it to centre. 

And what seems to be even better is that, perhaps, even in a brain injury where the movement has been lost for 20 years, that very movement is actually hardwired in and when it feels that ability to pass through centre, to both lengthen and contract properly, the brain grabs hold of that movement and says “I’m keeping that”.

Efficient movement is hard wired into us, efficient movement is less energetic meaning we would have more for over endeavours, evolutionary speaking. 

If we can have a body that wants to stand upright, stacked on its axis’ properly then it gives the greatest amount of of opportunity to both lengthen/contract, flex/extend, rotate left/right and always return back to centre. 

As if I wasn’t already aware that Gary Ward’s anatomy in motion model was the best through which to view human movement, working with a traumatic brain injury that’s 20 years old and seeing such a marked change and have the client also immediately notice it too, just puts the cherry on the cake. 

If someone with a traumatic brain injury can begin to move and feel better within 90 minutes, perhaps you can too. 

Why not get in touch to start your own movement journey to move with less pain, more confidence and a far greater understanding of your own body and how to move it better in the future yourself.

"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.