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Here we are again with one of my two-minute talks - well, perhaps a little
bit longer. But there you are, the information's there. All about painful feet - really the
scurge of anybody's life. Unbearably painful, of course, in all degrees but a lot
of people literally in pain with every step. And like all things skeletal when
they go wrong it's largely a matter of muscles gone awry. You can be born of
course with flatter feet, but for those people who acquire flat feet or who
develop very painful feet through life or develop what we call plantar fasciitis
through life, it's to do with the arches dropping. Now let's go through the
anatomy. There are three arches, in fact. People think of just the medial
arch - the arch on the inside that is - the biggest arch. And then we have the
transverse arch between the base of the big toe and the base of the little toe - not
shown here - and then we have the flatter lateral arch. And bear in mind
that, as you can see here, the shape of the bones slotting together gives a
natural arch, like a sandstone bridge, with a keystone at the top so the bones, in a sense, all fall together.
What keeps the arches suspended, and literally gives you spring to
your step, is the various muscle groups. So there are the long muscle groups
that come from your calf and create a lovely elastic stirrup, crossing over under
the sole of your foot, holding the arch suspended. There are also
the intrinsic feet muscles that actually suspend the arches up as they work your
toes. And here we have the beautiful arch of the ballet dancer Nijinsky who was
reputed to have had the highest leap, because it's these muscles springing the
arch upwards that give you push off with every step and give you spring to your step.
So you'll see in the exercises to follow that, in fact, that exercise is
mimicked - where you're not standing on the ball of your
foot, you are literally, I'm going to be getting you to stand on your tippy toes -
but that will come. So dropped arches is really a matter of the muscles not
working properly. Aided and abetted, I might say,
by wearing shoes too often - not wearing bare feet often enough.
Not using the toes here to scrunch, and keep the muscle spanning the underside
of the foot active, that helps sling this arch - pinches it up high like a
chicken's foot. Now what happens when the arch drops is that these
bones all scrunch together. What can happen too is pain from a different
source, which is stretching of the sort of calico tissue under the skin on the
base of the foot called the plantar fascia. When the arch drops that can be
stretched and that's a very uncomfortable additional source of pain.
There is, of course, another reason that you get pain painful feet which is again
insidious, as the development of flat feet is of course - but that is caused by a
problem in your back, where the nerve supply to the feet is hampered by what's
going on in your back. Here you can see all the vertebrae here have the spinal
nerves coming out between, coalescing into what we call the sciatic nerve,
going down the back of the leg. It's largely really those nerve roots that
supply the power to the muscles that sling your arches up. Now when you have
embarrassment here - what we call embarrassment here - giving you pain or
you may not even have lower back pain, but you can have that in insidious diminution
in the power of the muscles of your feet, because of the stuff going on in your back.
But, that's another matter, let me show you now just a few simple exercises that
help you get your feet a) mobile, and b) strengthen the arch, so that your arch is
better supported and that you've got better push-off when you're walking.
So here we go