MAT™ and Healthy Feet: Orthotics

Image courtesy of thephiladelphiapodiatrist.com

Last week I described how participating in the Muscle Activation Techniques™ process can provide the opportunity for the muscles of your lower legs and feet to contract better, potentially allowing for more motion to occur around the different joints of your feet and more force to be appropriately applied through these joints.  I then discussed how these joints in fact need a certain amount of motion and force through them to be healthy.  This means that if the muscles are not contracting efficiently and motion and appropriate force application is subsequently limited around and through these joints, the health of these joints is at risk.  The irony of all of this is much of today's society is doing something to intentionally limit the motion of the joints of their feet:  wearing orthotics.

Let me first start by saying what this post is not doing:

1) This post is not saying orthotics are bad.  There may be a specific reason why you or somebody else has no other choice but to wear them.

2) This post is not telling you to immediately get rid of your orthotics.  That could cause a lot of discomfort if your body is not ready for it.

3) This post is not telling you to completely disregard everything that the person who put you in orthotics has told you.

What this post is trying to do is to present some information that you may not be aware of regarding what may be happening to your feet by wearing orthotics.

So why do people commonly wear orthotics?  One of the biggest reasons I hear of people wearing orthotics is because of plantar fasciitis.  Plantar fasciitis may develop when pronation continually occurs during the propulsive phase of gait, causing the plantar fascia to become inflamed.  When you wear orthotics, the amount your foot is able to pronate is typically limited, which prevents those tissues from getting beat up any further.  Subsequently, relief may be felt.

Here are a couple of the issues:  First, while the orthotics provide the stability that is needed by the foot so as to not pronate during the propulsive phase of gait, they are not addressing why the foot was pronating during that phase of gait in the first place.  They are metaphorically solving the issue of repeatedly breaking your arm by permanently casting it instead of teaching you how to not run into walls (or parked cars, street light posts, or barn doors, depending who/where you are).  A permanent casting may work just fine, unless it limits your ability to perform a motion how you would normally perform it.  This would cause you to figure out other, possibly less efficient, ways to move, which may begin to have their own negative consequences.

Second, and what is relevant to the topic of this post, is by limiting the ability of the foot to pronate at all--not just during the propulsive phase of gait--the motion that is supposed to occur at specific joints is no longer occurring.  Consider this akin to the muscles of your feet not contracting as well and thereby limiting the motion at specific joints in your feet.

And then we are back at last week's post.

Instead of introducing this "all pronation limiting" device, Muscle Activation Techniques™ can potentially improve how the muscles of the lower leg and feet contract, allowing the joints of your feet to be controlled better.  This means that your feet could pronate when they are supposed to and not pronate when they are not supposed to, which may allow for both appropriate motion and force to be involved with the joints of your feet.

Specific joints need specific amounts of motion in order to stay healthy.  Specific joints need specific amounts of force through them in order to stay healthy.  Limiting either in any way limits the health of the joints.

Have you experienced how Muscle Activation Techniques™ can help you reinstate the health of your feet?

Inter­ested in find­ing out more? Check out the “Mus­cle Acti­va­tion Tech­niques™” page.

Inter­ested in set­ting up an assess­ment time or dis­cussing this sub­ject fur­ther? E-mail Char­lie at charlie@selfmadefitness.com.

Your body. Your training.

Want to use this arti­cle in your blog, newslet­ter, or other plat­form? You may, but be sure to include all of the bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion found in the yellow box below!