Who doesn’t love a good pair of sneakers? They’re stylish and serve a purpose, but sometimes ditching them might actually help with your mobility. Celebrity podiatrist Dr. Emily Splichal shares some insights on barefoot science to help prevent injuries and boost your mobility!
For dancers, athletes, surgeons, or pilots, precision in movement is essential for success. Even slight inaccuracies can have serious consequences, not just for them but for those around them. While we might not all have such demanding jobs, we can still apply the idea of precise movement to our daily lives.
As a podiatrist in New York City, I often see patients with foot pain issues like Achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, and stress fractures. I attribute many of these injuries to poor impact control and inaccurate movement patterns, especially in walking. Walking is the second most common unconscious activity we do daily (breathing being the first), yet we often take the accuracy needed for walking for granted. The interaction between our feet and the ground is crucial and frequently overlooked.
Walking is essentially a series of controlled falls that require minimal external energy. With each step, gravity accelerates our leg forward into the next step. When our heel strikes the ground, our body absorbs forces that are 1 to 1.5 times our body weight in less than 50 milliseconds. Our bodies are designed to absorb and store this energy as potential energy and release it as elastic energy. For this to work effectively, our bodies need to anticipate the ground. Reacting after foot strike is too late and can lead to inaccuracies, compensations, and injuries.
Movement accuracy is linked to anticipation or pre-programmed responses to known patterns, often stored in the cerebellum based on past experiences. Researchers like Dr. Benno Nigg have explored this extensively. If we could anticipate the ground and the forces before each heel strike, we could load the impact forces more efficiently, improve movement accuracy, and lower the risk of injury.
Our movement patterns depend on the quality of the information our nervous system receives. Poor movement patterns lead to inaccuracies. When it comes to walking, shoes can significantly contribute to these inaccuracies because the plantar foot is full of sensitive receptors. Any barrier, like shoes, between the foot and the ground changes the information reaching the nervous system. This affects the rate and intensity of impact forces, foot placement accuracy, and perception of the ground, increasing the risk of injury.
I often recommend that my patients integrate some barefoot stimulation into their daily routines. This could be a simple barefoot trigger point release in the morning or a few minutes of barefoot movement prep before a run. The benefits of freeing your feet and stimulating your nervous system from the ground up are immense. Here are some of my favorite tips to get started with barefoot science to improve your mobility and overall health!
