Who doesn’t love a great pair of sneakers? They’re functional and stylish, but sometimes you may need to set aside your Nikes to boost your mobility. Celebrity podiatrist Dr. Emily Splichal shares some insights on barefoot techniques that can prevent injuries and enhance your mobility.
For dancers, athletes, surgeons, or pilots, precise movement is crucial to their professional success. Even small inaccuracies can have serious consequences, not just for themselves but for others too. Although not all of us have such demanding movement requirements, the concept of precision in movement is still relevant in our daily lives.
As a podiatrist in NYC, I often see patients with foot pain issues like Achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, and stress fractures. These are typically associated with poor impact force management and inaccurate movement patterns, particularly in walking. Walking, our second most common subconscious activity after breathing, often doesn’t get the attention it deserves in terms of movement accuracy.
Walking involves a series of controlled falls and ideally requires minimal effort. With each step, gravity propels our leg forward to make contact with the ground. When the heel strikes, impact forces equivalent to 1 – 1.5 times our body weight enter our body in less than 50 milliseconds. These forces should be absorbed by the body, stored as potential energy, and released as elastic energy. For this to happen effectively, our body needs to anticipate the ground before every step. Reacting to the impact forces after the foot hits the ground is too late.
Delayed responses can lead to inaccurate movement, compensatory patterns, and injuries. Movement accuracy is closely tied to movement anticipation or pre-programmed motor responses based on known movement patterns, often stored in the cerebellum from past experiences.
Dr. Benno Nigg from the University of Calgary is a key researcher in this field. Imagine if we could anticipate the ground and impact forces before each heel strike. This could allow us to load impact forces more efficiently and accurately, potentially reducing our risk of injuries.
To improve movement accuracy, it’s crucial that our movement patterns are based on accurate sensory information. Poor movement patterns can lead to inaccuracies. One major contributor to such inaccuracies in walking and impact force loading is our shoes. The soles of our feet contain thousands of sensitive receptors. Any barrier, like shoes, between these receptors and the ground can distort the sensory information reaching our nervous system, altering our perception of impact forces and surface compliance, and increasing injury risk.
I often advise my patients to incorporate barefoot stimulation into their daily routines. This can be as simple as a barefoot trigger point release in the morning or five minutes of barefoot exercises before a run. The goal is to stimulate the nervous system from the ground up. Here are some tips to get started:
Barefoot science can significantly improve your mobility and overall health. Start integrating these tips into your daily routine!
