10 Healthy Steps to Stronger Feet

Free your feet from the confines of your modern, fashionable shoes as often as possible.  When sitting at work, take OFF your shoes.  Cramped feet get tight around all the 33 joints that otherwise would give you a supple, adaptable foot.  Shoes should ideally be shaped like our feet: wide and splayed at the toes. Owning at least one pair of properly fit shoes and choosing them most of the time is a great idea.  See our video on minimalist casual shoes here.  A few brands to consider are Vivobarefoot, Lems, and Leguano.

It's all too common to see toes develop bunions, hammertoes, and calluses from poorly shaped footwear.  To uncramp the toes and align them to their natural shape, let them splay and point straight!  Our toes are five levers that engage our arch and the entire foot to create a functional foot.  Toe socks, corrective spacers and mobility exercises help to restore poor alignment.

Proper posture from the neck down is best achieved with a flat heeled angle. However, modern shoes with elevated heel positions cause many feet to become dysfunctionally dependent on the heel being raised. Slowly adapt your body over time to being barefoot or in flat heeled shoes. Listen to your body and progress slowly for long term benefit.

Like a toddler taking their first steps, we count on feeling the ground with the nerves in our feet to input sensory information to the brain. Our vestibular and proprioceptive systems are stimulated through our bare soles. Just like knitting with oven mitts would hardly tell us what to do with our fingers, overbuilt and stiff shoes shut down the signals our feet use as messengers to everything above. Engage your bare feet or use thin shoes when possible to get as much information as possible to the neuro-muscular system. This yields greater stability, balance, coordination and agility.

Trophic means to feed or nourish and therefore atrophy is the absence of nourishment.  Atrophy to muscles or range of motion occurs when we don’t engage our tissues often enough.  Sitting requires very little action from muscle or joints due to an absence of load or motion.  We tighten up, lose circulation and tissues weaken.  This causes degradation of function in our feet (and a long list of other things!) and creates problems when we do want to move.  Change your seating position and work setup, or try getting down on the floor to sit in different positions for variety throughout the day.

Varied textures in surfaces allow our joints more  ‘bandwidth’ to explore movement. Let your feet explore grassy hills, tiny pebbles, warm sand, and other surfaces to prevent overdosing on flat, artificial surfaces.

Humans are designed to move frequently at slow speeds. Due to increased sitting and limited time to exercise, many people only move if they are exercising, which can be too intense when that’s the only movement being performed. Walking is low impact and highly effective at stimulating our circulation while loading weight on our bodies safely. There is no ‘upper limit’ to walking, but rather do ‘as much as you can’. Don’t underrate the power of this activity for strong feet and longevity!

Joints require space to move through the range of motion they operate with, and they need motion to allow fluids to pass through them.  It’s how joints stay healthy.  To mobilize the foot’s 26 bones and 33 joints, just grab a lacrosse ball or Yoga Tune Up Ball.  Place this under your foot, and roll out each foot daily.  This will unravel the tightness in your feet and give your feet more ‘freedom’ to move.  Just 1-2 minutes of rolling through the arches and around the toes can do wonders when done regularly!

Our feet are dynamic springs that can store an exceptional amount of energy in ligaments, muscles and fascia. When these tissues are restricted or atrophied, they lose the ability to act as springs. Try loading the feet (ideally barefoot) by doing balance drills, changing pressures, light hopping, or walking on your toes. This helps engage the tissues in your feet and improves your feets’ ability to function.  Exercises like ‘short foot’ and ‘foot tripod’ will help you stabilize your feet via the arches and toes (video here).

On a car, the rubber meets the road with its tires but the wheels don’t steer themselves!  The driver controls the direction of the car with the steering wheel.  Similarly, our feet respond to steering from the hips and core.  Control from the hips is vitally important, but so many individuals have poor movement and restrictions (sitting, lack of stretching) or strength (worsened by tightness or ideal demands on the hips).  Once the control from our hips is lost, our feet compensate just like a car being pulled to the side by bad steering.  Working out the hips with joint range of motion work or daily yoga is a monumental step towards strong and functional feet!