Fast Fitness - Fix Flat Feet, Pronation, and Fallen Arches

Here is Fast Friday Fitness - feel how your own muscles work to hold arch support, so that you can have healthy arches without artificial shoe arch supports or orthotics, which weaken the supporting muscles from disuse:

1. Stand with feet parallel and look in a mirror where you can see your feet, or just look down.
2. Pull outward until your arches rise and restore, and your ankles are straight
3. Use this as your new natural position, gaining built-in muscle strength and arch stability with each step you take.

Click the arrow to see the short movie made for us by reader David from Belgium. First he allows his weight to shirt inward, pushing his arch flatter toward the floor. Then at seconds 3 to 4 in the movie, he uses the outer muscles to pull to straight neutral ankle position. At seconds 8 to 9 he allows the arch to sag again, then simply restores and holds a healthy arch from second 13 onward.

You can have healthful arch position too. Legs and feet have posture that you can control yourself. Use your own muscles and get free built-in exercise and arch support all day, and stop painful poor positioning.

Labels: ankle, arches, fast fitness, feet, fix pain, posture, pronation, video/movie

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Fast Fitness - Strength, Abs, Balance, and Ankle and Leg Stabilization

Here is Friday Fast Fitness - quickly increase functional stabilization of the knee, leg, and ankle while increasing overall strength and balance.

Anyone can lift weights, but can you do it balancing on a basketball? Get started by standing on one foot:

1. Do your regular lifts, curls, presses while standing on one foot (and then the other). Breathe.


2. Notice the leg you stand on. Don't let the arch of your foot flatten toward the floor, or knee roll inward toward the other leg. Hold knee, ankle, arch inline, using your muscles. See Arch Support Is Not From Shoes.
   


3. Don't lean your upper body backward (increasing lower back arch) when lifting arms up - a hidden source of back pain. See Change Daily Reaching to Get Ab Exercise and Stop Back and Shoulder Pain.

It reduces exercise to sit, even on a fitness ball. It is more exercise, more functional, and better balance training to stand on one foot than to sit. You sit all day already.

Be safe, be excited about having fun doing functional movement, be happy.

Labels: abdominal muscles, ankle, arches, arm, balance, exercise ball, fast fitness, hip strength, knee, leg strength, neutral spine, pronation, sitting, strength

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Fixing Fitness Myths

"The public has an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except which is worth knowing." - Oscar Wild

April 1 seems to be a day to notice, more than usual, if things in the news are not facts but April Fool. On other days, urban legends and other stories are still popular, sometimes more popular than what is really going on.

The observation that the Earth is flat seemed obviously true at one time until we had more information. It used to be a taught as a medical fact that the cause of epilepsy was masturbation. When I was in school, one of my medical books stated that you don't need to eat calcium since you can "get all you need from your bones." It is true that you pull calcium from your bones when you don't eat enough, although with unhealthy results.

The post Forensic Science told of two crime-science myths, often still taught in forensic books and popularized in television shows, which were never true. Following are more posts hoping to replace myth with information, so that you can get stronger and do more, without the injuries or restrictions in activity that are part of many fitness or injury rehab practices.

Feet and Ankles

Myth - You need tight shoes for support. Fact - tight shoes can deform toes and prevent healthy muscle use:
Are Your Shoes Too Tight?
and Healthy Toe Stretches.

Myth - All ankle stretches prevent sprains. Fact - Some may enhance predisposition to ankle sprains:
Unhealthy Yoga Ankles.

Myth - Following an ankle sprain, bracing must be continuous since no exercise can restore the area. Here is another way -
How To Treat Ankle Sprains and Prevent Them
and
No More Ankle Sprains Part II.

Dispelling Myths of Orthotics Use:

Myth - Only orthotics can place your arches in neutral position. Fact - your own muscles can often do the same:
Arch Support Is Not From Shoes
and
Which Shoes Help Exercise, Fall Prevention, and Ankles?

Dispelling Aging Myths - That respiratory function only declines with age:

Do Breathing Exercises Work?

Dispelling Aging Myths - That you only get weaker with aging:

Getting Stronger is for Everyone
What I Learned at the Aging Conference
Better Balance by Christmas
Conference on Aging Dec 2, 2006 in Midtown New York.

Dispelling Nutrition for Exercise Myths:

That weight gain with aging is primarily lower metabolism: Metabolism - How to Lose Weight and Save Money

or that Healthy eating is difficult or expensive:
What Medical Students Told Me About Nutrition.

Myth that you must eat much protein to get muscles:
Get Muscles for Christmas

Myth that acid prevention drugs are harmless:
Stomach Acid Drugs May Increase Osteoporosis and Hip Fractures

Myth that food marked "Health Food" means it has to be healthy:
Is Your Health Food Unhealthy
and Exercise Common Sense Discipline - Turn Down Halloween Junk Food

and the myth that it's healthy for children to eat junk food:
A Little Good Exercise, a Lot of Bad Food - Overweight Still No Mystery.

Myths that only gyms and weights can improve your strength:

How to get natural exercise is in Rocky IV and Healthier Exercise,
Getting Stronger Without a Gym
Exercising With A Friend - Partner Leg Press
Don't Confuse Exercise With Real Fitness
Healthy Toe Stretches
Quick and Fun Arm and Body Strengthener
and Quick and Easy Strength and Balance Exercise.

More to come for smart, fun, healthier ways to get exercise.

Labels: aging, ankle, arches, arm, balance, breathing, feet, fix pain, forensic, holiday, leg stretch, myths, nutrition, osteoporosis, partner exercise, shoes, sprain, strength, toes, yoga

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When Did Health Become Thinking Out Of The Box?

We're just back from teaching the medical school elective in wilderness medicine. Same food as last year. But the creek was thinly iced - good for ice swimming.

Before lecturing, I worried that my information on health - stand up straight, eat right, exercise, "and all that," would be so known and obvious to the bright young medical students that it would bore them. Instead, it was called, "Out of the box." When did health become out of the box?

I spent years of my career in a lab as a serious, intensely number-checking research scientist. I worked to ensure that we knew what truly worked, and what was hype, unrelated, or just wrong. I made certain that what I discovered and developed for patients was squarely right, practical, and in the best interest of the patient (and fun too, which is health). All I pursued was The Truth. Matt Cartmill once said, "As a youth I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life. So I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet women."

Why is bypass surgery, angioplasty, stents, obesity, diabetes, and medications with uncomfortable, unhealthful side effects considered normal, while eating a vegetarian diet is labeled wacky and extreme when it is medically documented to stop and prevent heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and other prevalent conditions that rob people of joy in life?

In my diving medicine lectures, I wanted students to see how the information worked and how it relates to many things in and out of diving, not just dictate lists of conditions to memorize. I showed slides, asking them to identify why an accident would happen on the way down versus up and why. I told them that if they understood, they would not have to memorize. I just wanted them to think. As my father once enlightened me, "Jolie, you're asking a lot!"

In the orthopedic lectures, I taught the same principles I tell in this Fitness Fixer blog of gaining great physical improvements without making pain and injury in the first place. After one of my lectures, students scattered for personal time, while a few stayed in the lecture hall, bent over laptops. They sat hunched, rubbing sore shoulders. Eventually one nudged the other, "Get the doc, she's right here." After some indecision, one student asked me to give him stretches to fix the pain of working at the computer. I told him you can sit and work without getting pain in the first place, and why didn't I show him that, instead of a stretch as an "antidote." He protested that the computer made his neck hurt. I agreed that the way he was sitting would do that, and repeated that you can easily sit and work in a way that doesn't cause the pain in the first place. More protests came, that as students they had to work on the computer long hours.

Medicine is not supposed to consist of allowing bad things to happen so that you can do a cool procedure to try to reverse it. Readers, do you want to try what I showed him and get a free house-call right now?

• I moved his chair in close to the table where he was working. Move yours in close now.
• Standing behind him with my hands on his shoulders, I gently pulled his upper body up and back to rest against the chair back. At home you can feel me guide your shoulders and upper body back.
• Next, keep the chin gently in, not jutting forward.
• We moved his computer back from the front edge of the table to make room to rest his forearms while using the keyboard. If you use a "below-desk" keyboard tray, it is often better to move the keyboard back to the desk. Don't crane your wrists, making a new problem. Relax and breathe.
• I told them that at my own desks, I raise computer on a shelf, block, or book about 10 inches higher than desk level, and use a cheap external keyboard. Even without these helpful changes, you don't have to round forward over a laptop.
• The seat back of the lecture chairs were concave - shaped to curve like the letter "C" so that you sat rounded forward. This is a common problem in many chairs, even some called ergonomic chairs. Another of the students mentioned he had a commercial lumbar roll at home. It was expensive and he didn't use it much because it was uncomfortable. I showed them how to use a small soft roll, which can be your gloves or light sweater, nothing fancy or expensive. Nestle it in the small inward curve of the lower back, then press your upper back, not lower back, against the chair back so that you can sit straight and lean back, instead of rounding forward. Pressing the lower back against the lumbar roll is a common way to make it useless and uncomfortable.
• See these posts to see how you may be doing unhealthy sitting without realizing it, during work, play, and exercise:

Are You Making Your Exercise Unhealthy?
Disc Pain - Not a Mystery, Easy to Fix
Sitting Badly Isn't Magically Healthy by Calling It a Hamstring Stretch.

It turned out that most of the young, active, outdoorsy, academically talented medical students had muscle and joint pain. So did many of the top ranked physician faculty. Several told me they thought their pain was normal from their activities, from studying, their fallen arches, or body structure. They regularly took anti-inflammatory medicines and thought they needed special shoes. The posts Arch Support Is Not From Shoes and Which Shoes Help Exercise, Fall Prevention, and Ankles? show how you can simply use your own muscles to have healthy foot and ankle mechanics and no pain, and Healthier Backpack Carrying to Get Better Exercise and Stop Back Pain shows how it is not the backpack, but mostly how you carry them that makes or stops back pain.

You probably heard not to slouch since you were a child. That easy medicine hasn't changed. You heard to eat vegetables for health and an apple a day to keep the doctor away. I think a lot of the kids I was teaching caught on and will help many with what they learned. It's easy. It's true. Who is the one who is out of the box?

Labels: arches, nutrition, sitting, upper back

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Arch Support Is Not From Shoes

The previous post showed how the best ankle support comes from your own ankle, leg, and foot muscles. Pronation (flat, sagging arches) is rarely just the way your feet are made or something you can't prevent. You may allow ankles to bend inward and sag, or you can prevent sagging and easily hold your ankles in healthy position, no differently than not letting your posture sag anywhere else.

It is commonly taught in gyms, medical schools, aerobics certification programs, and footwear stores all over the US, that shoes or orthotics are necessary to hold up your arches. That is a fallacy. The needed support should come from your own foot muscles. How do you do this?

• Stand up with both feet parallel, pointing straight ahead.
• Allow your body weight to slump downward, pressing your arches against the floor (left hand photo). You will notice that your arches flatten, reducing the arch, not because there is something wrong with your arches, but simply because you allowed it.
• Next, use the muscles on the outsides of your ankles and legs to gently shift your weight more to the soles of your feet and off your arch (right hand photo). Don't tilt completely to the side or stand on the sides of your feet, just shift enough to lift your arches from the floor.
• Now you can see that having arch support is the same as having neck support by using your upper body muscles to stop slouching. Pull your chin inward gently right now to remind yourself of this.

Support your feet by holding position using your own muscles, not a shoe 'straight jacket' that lets ankles atrophy and doesn't let toes move, stretch, and straighten.

See fun posts on foot and ankle health:
Healthy Toe Stretches and Unhealthy Yoga Ankles and my web site page Inspiring Patient Stories for a first-hand account of someone who fixed a lifetime of pain and pronation by simply stopping the cause - letting ankles and feet sag. By simply holding healthy positions during your normal day, you can get free built in exercise for your feet and ankles, and better health. See the book, "Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery" for how to have healthy arches and foot support.

Labels: ankle, arches, feet, fix pain, myths, orthotics, pronation, shoes

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Which Shoes Help Exercise, Fall Prevention, and Ankles?

We are in the cold, damp Tennessee mountains for the rest of the week, teaching at a medical school program of wilderness medicine. It should be warmer than home in the Northeast US where it's snowing, and the Schuylkill River, and water bottle on my bicycle are frozen. I won't have Internet or phone access at the wilderness camp. Unflagging Healthline staffer Carrie Locke is posting the blogs for me all week. Thank you Carrie, once again.

For wilderness treks and hikes, and everyday walking, you need to walk on uneven surfaces without stumbling or spraining your ankles. Expensive shoes, inserts, arch supports, braces, ankle supports, and orthotics are sold on the belief that they are needed to hold your foot and ankle in position. However, this is an expensive fallacy.

You are the one who can hold your ankles in straight position or let them sag into foot pronation. You don't need, or even want, shoes that hold your ankles straight for you. Without use, your ankle muscles weaken. With shoe support, your ankle doesn't have to work to hold itself. It gets weaker. It forgets how. It is the opposite of what is needed.

It is not high top shoes or ace bandages or taping or orthotics that prevent falls and ankle sprains, or prevent ankles from sagging inward or "pronation." The most important thing you can do for healthy ankles and preventing sprains is to use your own leg muscles, and simply hold your ankles without sagging, the same as any other posture. Think of a beginning skater. At first, they let their ankles bend and sag inward. They do not know how to hold their legs using their own muscles. Eventually, they learn to hold straight, healthful positioning.

Letting your ankles sag inward can press the joints of your arches, ankles, knees, even hips. In most instances, supportive shoes and inserts are no more needed than putting your mouth in a sling to keep it from falling open when you walk around. Thinking that you need supportive shoes to brace uninjured ankles for hiking and walking is a common myth that perpetuates weak, unstable ankles. Many people who use arch supports never learn how to use their own muscles, and are told to never go barefoot. This is an unfortunate and unnecessary restriction to their health.

The post Healthy Knees shows what inward-sagging knee positioning looks like and how to fix it. It is easy to do and makes an immediate and important improvement to your joint health.

Often in wilderness settings, I see hikers in expensive boots. The native mountain guides and pack-bearers are wearing flip-flops. This is not just a salary inequality. It is not that the guides don't know ankle health. They know something crucial - the health of your ankles comes from your own muscles. You will save much money on footwear and products that prevent your foot and ankle muscles from working, and you will get free, built-in leg and foot exercise with every step.

Read more how to have healthy ankles and ankle support in the book Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery.

Labels: ankle, arches, feet, hip, orthotics, pronation, shoes

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Healthy Toe Stretches

Don't forget to stretch your toes. You need mobile toes for balance, healthy walking mechanics, and foot health.

Every day, take your feet in your hands and stretch your toes apart side to side, easily and comfortably. Make sure all your toes can move apart from each other, and that each one moves up and down. It is not healthy for your toes to remain stuck together and not moving.

Sitting in various ways can be a built-in stretch for the toes. If you sit on your heels, as in the photo at left, or kneel on your hands and knees with toes curled under you, or when you are sitting in your chair right now, see if you can bend your foot behind you and still touch all your toes to the floor - even your little toes. Don't force toes to bend, just gently see if they all reach the floor. After stretching your toes back (toward the top of your foot) bend them all down toward the bottom of your foot. Many people, particularly people who wear heeled shoes wind up with toes that are bent upward all the time. The tendons on the top of the foot can shorten from keeping the toes bent up, and the toes can get stuck in a pulled-up position. Future posts will cover more on stretching your feet for mobility, pain control, and health.

When you sit, as in the photo above, see if you can rise to a stand without pushing off the floor with your hands or bracing your hands against your leg or knee. Just use your leg muscles and get a strength and balance exercise while you get a nice stretch on the bottom of your feet.

The photo was taken when I studied a medicine course in Cambodia. Before and after classes you practice respect, concentration, and self-discipline. While you do this, you get a lot of physical exercise - it is commonplace for people of any age to kneel without using hands for anything except to hold the candles, flowers, and incense, and to rise the same way. The photo was taken in the middle of bowing, so I am not fully straightened yet. The nun is laughing. My Cambodian is so bad that I made her laugh. I think that is good exercise and good medicine too.

Photo by Paul

Labels: ankle, arches, balance, feet, fix pain, gait, leg strength, orthotics, pronation, shoes, spirit, squat, strength, stretch, toes

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Healthy Knees

My Tuesday night martial arts students worked hard last night on sweeps, falls, tumbling, and quick recovery to their feet. Each week they also learn a new jump rope technique. They have been getting good at fast skipping, crossing the rope in multiple spins to the front, sides, and overhead, and varied footwork during jumps.

When landing from jumps, it is important not to let your knees knock inward under your body weight (photo at left). It is important for knee health not only when jumping, but descending the stairs, bending for all daily needs, and even getting in and out of your chair.

Letting your weight fall to the inside of your knee joint, instead of holding your weight evenly on your knees using your own leg muscles, adds load and wear to the cartilage on the inner surface of the knee bones, stresses the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in the middle, overstretches the ligament on the inner side of the knee, and can damage a meniscus. A menscus is one of two small cushions in each knee between the knee bones. Letting knees sway inward more commonly damages the medial meniscus (the inner one) although either or both can be stretched or twisted by bad knee positioning. Letting your knees sway inward is not a "condition," and not unavoidable or something you are born to have. It is a posture you can control using your own muscles to hold your legs from swaying inward.

A while back I took a box-aerobics class because I had a coupon for a free week at a local club. The woman in front of me was stomping up and down as she swatted the air. Her knees bumped together every time her feet landed. Her feet were at least ten inches apart yet her knees bashed together, over and over, bending inward at the knee joint. It was alarming.

Don't let your knees (or ankles) sway inward under your weight. Use your muscles to hold knees in position, over your feet:

• When landing, land lightly - softly. Don't pound. The only noise should be the whirring of the jump rope, not your feet slamming the ground, transmitting shock to your knees and hips, and up your spine.
• Bend your knees lightly when you land. Don't land straight-legged.
• When you bend your knees for landing, don't let them sway inward.
• Keep kneecaps facing the same direction as toes, not twisting inward.
• Land softly, on the ball of the foot first. Quickly bring heels down while bending knees to absorb impact.

Remember healthy knee positioning during all activities. Look at your own knees and other people's knees when they take the stairs, and when bending to reach or retrieve things for healthy bending at home and work. Notice knees when you get out of your chair and sit back down. Don't let knees sway inward. Hold them above your ankles, not inward.

It is easy to control leg positioning for healthy knee joints while you stand, bend, take stairs, exercise, and jump so that your daily life and exercise is healthy.


Photos and more on keeping knees healthy during exercise, in the book Healthy Martial Arts and Fix Your Own Pain Without Drugs or Surgery

Labels: aging, ankle, arches, fix pain, injury, knee, leg strength, martial arts, orthotics, posture, pronation, strength, stretch

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