They will help your body maintain the above structural alignments, and strengthen your foot and ankle complex all the way up to your hips, building a solid foundation for movement. The following moves are part of the Ground Force series from Samsara Experience, where I work as a coach. Perform this alignment several times per day, or whenever you find yourself standing. Volume: Do three to five repetitions of activating and relaxing. You may want the help of a mirror or a friend at first. Just go far enough to orient those tendon landmarks in their ideal position-otherwise, you can overcorrect into supination, putting excessive weight on the outside of the foot and lifting off of the big toes. Your foot position should remain static except for a noticeable lift of the arch, enough to allow you to tuck your fingertips underneath your arch close to the front of your heel. Maintain even pressure through the toes and the balls of your feet. Relax your quads-the effort should be coming from your hips. Your femurs should spin open into external rotation. This will feel like a gentle twist of your left hip counterclockwise and your right hip clockwise. Engage the deep hip rotators by ‘spinning the discs’ without moving your feet. How to do it: Stand barefoot and imagine that you have two flat discs under both of your feet. Helps build strength, elasticity, and resilience in the feet and ankles, knees, and hips. What it does: Engages the external hip rotators to align the anatomical landmarks we identified above and lift the arches. Deep Hip External Rotator Activation: The Fingertip Lift With excessive internal rotation, you might see them angled slightly outward. You can check out your alignment by referencing a couple of anatomical landmarks: the vertical tendons of the hamstring muscles behind your knees and the achilles tendons behind your ankles. Typically, overpronation goes hand-in-hand with excessive internal rotation of the femurs, which you can see in the video below. Symptoms vary but include obvious pain, tendinitis, and numbness at the foot and ankle as well as more sneaky complaints up the kinetic chain like knee and hip pain. Additionally, genetics, muscle and connective tissue weakness, alignment, and gait mechanics can all lead to fallen arches. The structure of the hips naturally inclines the body to collapsed arches: the femur bones angle inward, from a wide pelvis to a more narrow base of support at the feet, exposing our bodies to forces that we have to combat with postural strength. Overpronation happens when the vertical, curved shape of our natural foot arch collapses while weight bearing. Fallen arches-also known as overpronation-are a common source of local foot and ankle issues and can lead to issues further upstream, in the knees, hips, and spine. Our feet and ankles are our foundation, and weaknesses here can lead to a host of issues elsewhere. Now, imagine a skyscraper with a collapsed foundation-it’s not just the ground floors that are compromised: the entire architecture is at stake. Our bodies are a bit like buildings: the physical structure is constantly resisting gravity.
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