Improve Your Posture Through Your Feet
BY ANNETTE VERPILLOT 22 JULY, 2020
You’ve probably heard the expression: you can’t build a house on a crooked foundation.
A house built on a solid, well-planned foundation, will create a great base for the rest of the structure, and the same goes for our bodies. If you have lower back pain, muscle stiffness and decreased range of motion, those ailments can be due to uneven muscle tension, but did you ever think to look down to see if your problem starts beyond the site of the pain?
The problem may be coming from your feet!
You may not actually have foot pain, but the foot is composed of 26 bones, 33 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons, and ligaments, all of which serve the purpose to tell your brain where you are in space. The feet also share an intimate connection with the bones and muscles located above the ankle due to the anatomical chain. .
Foot alignment can cause an array of problems including back pain, sciatica, sacral joint pain, sway back, hip joint pain, posture problems, tightness in the legs and back, disc bulges, knee pain, osteoarthritis, pelvic imbalance, piriformis syndrome and even headaches. And that is not including problems that can occur with the actual feet themselves.
How can your feet affect your posture?
According to a 2009 study done by the American Podiatric Medical Association, the average person walks 8,000 to 10,000 steps in one day. Proper weight bearing surfaces not only give your body optimal postural alignment, they also prevent you from wasting energy standing upright. This is especially important if you are seeking an active lifestyle. With misaligned feet, all of this walking can be very hard on your body and spine, and ultimately alter the mechanics of your spine.
So what can you do?
Let’s take a closer look: if one foot pronates and the other supinates in static posture, those imbalances will also take effect as you walk.Your knee rotates inward and your hip moves down on that side. The opposite will also happen with the supinated foot.
The missing link from most conventional treatment is to look at the feet through Neuroscience. The skin of the feet send information to the thalamus and sensory cortex. This information is then transmitted to the premotor and motor cortex for the execution of movement.
The foot in itself is composed of muscles and joints, all of which are part of our proprioceptive system.
When you function on a daily basis with uneven muscle tension, your muscles are unable to revert back to their original state.
After 365 days, this irregular muscle tension becomes fixated and your brain is no longer able to reverse the process.
Using the foot as a doorway to change faulty motor patterns is the first step in retraining your brain to eliminate muscular imbalances. You will feel much lighter and looser.
This is why we’ve created Proprioceptive Insoles. They are uniquely designed to stimulate the conscious and unconscious proprioceptive pathways that modulate muscle tone.
When worn on a daily basis, they reverse the adaptation of the fascial and muscular system slowly aligning the spine and reverting your posture to its physiological state.
Here is a list of a few studies:
Textured Insoles s/p ACL Reconstruction
Textured Insoles in Football Kicking
