Most Common Causes of Foot Pain and How to Fix Them
Hey there athletes and coaches, Michael Hughes here, Gymnazo Edu. Did you know that the left foot your left foot can massively affect how your right shoulder moves? Well, in this video, I’m going to describe to you how that is. Today I’m going to talk about the biomechanics of the foot. And we’re talking about the anatomy of it, how it moves the three planes of motion that it has access to, and what happens when all that’s not working together and the issues that can come up with it, I will, let’s dive into kind of a brief overview of this foot, and I got a little play foot right here, but acts and moves very similar to how foot actually moves. Well, our foot is essentially a polar dynamic. Gemini, in a sense, it’s two faced, it has all these types of ways of interacting with the world that have to do with this phrase, right? It has to be a mobile adapter, and a stable propeller. Both Yes, it must be goofy, fun and all about it. And it must be serious and all about just getting the job done. It has to be this person who’s like, Oh, I’m all about a rainy day. And also, I just love the sunny weather. It has to be two faced, it has to be this thing that can be whatever you need it to be when you need it. And that is a very, very tough job to take on. So how can this thing right here be all that and a bag of chips, the anatomy of the foot is simply this 26 Bones 44 muscles, right. So that’s just the basics, how those 26 bones and 44 Muscles interface with the lower leg, the tibia and fibia bones, and to the knee joint, into the femur and to the hip joint, and to the spine and to the scapula into the shoulder joint all starts right here. And it starts with the tri planar or three dimensional access that this foot has. So if I break it down, and we kind of implode into the foot, right, that’s going dive into the foot, let’s check it out. So you see that you have those long kind of finger looking bones at the very, very end, right. And those bones essentially go from the middle of the foot all the way to your toes. And then just behind those long kind of bones have these little kind of little choppy bones, you know, think about your wrist bones, well, those are your wrist bones in your foot, those bones right there, the mid tarsal holes in a sense, those have the ability to expand and then get really, really tight together. And that’s super important when we’re talking about the interface of foot. And then just up from that one right there. You have this bone is super important bone we call the torque converter bone, and that’s called the talus. And that talus bone even though it has not a single muscle connecting to it, there’s not a single muscle in the entire body that actually inserts into that bone. But it has massive amounts of connective tissue super encapsulated. It’s like Saran Wrap 1000 times with so much connective tissue. But that bone right there says okay, for what do you want to do? Gotcha. I’m going to tell the rest of the body upstairs on how to react it is the most important in terms of connecting forward and backwards motion to rotational motion. Hence the word or phrase torque converter by let’s dive into how this foot moves in all three planes of motion. I’m going to talk about the foot and the ankle kind of as a simpatico kind of relationship and how it all comes together. So we can we have this a sense called we call a kind of dorsiflexion as it comes together bends a little bit more of the ankle. And then plantar flexion. And the bike basically pointing and bringing the foot up kind of we call it the gas pedal and the brake pedal motion as we do that, but that is just the sagittal plane. That’s only 1/3 of the story. And kind of it’s an important point of the story, but not the most important important point of the story. The other two motion planes, which we’re going to get a good view from the backside here is this heel going out and going in, or essentially we’re going through a B duction or going through through abduction as it goes through in the rotational plane. And you can see when I move this heel, you see how this up or this lower limb right here, this this lower case we’ll call it the calf starts to rotate and move as well. That’s the transverse plane super important motion and then we have the frontal plane or the kicking out the kicking in as we get that kind of kick out. And that kick in. You can see how much this leg moves as well.
The cool thing about this model and actually represents pretty darn close by a chain reaction biomechanics through the body. When we take this heel and go out, we essentially call that EA version. Ie version is kind of a way to talk about the ankle joint in a sense, but each version gives us foot pronation or more of a flat foot and then we kind of kick the heel in we kind of call that motion sensing inversion. And you see what happens to the lower leg as it kind of moves there kind of goes that way. Well, that gives the foot kind of more of a supinated feel or more of a high arch feel right, just a quick review, we got the dorsiflexion, we have the plantar flexion, we have the E version, we have the inversion. And the version essentially is abduction with internal rotation. And then we have the abduction with external rotation. And those that kind of covers the major motions of what the Foot Ankle can do. So if you land on your heel, first thing when you walk, right, I don’t recommend doing it when you run. But when you walk, you land on your heel, what happens is because most of us should land essentially on the outside of our heels, when we’re walking right gait, the body is going to roll in the heel is going to roll in when when it does that. And when that heel hits the ground and the foot rolls in, that’s where that subtalar joint that talus, that bone that starts to kind of roll into, but doesn’t just roll in, it also turns in a little bit. And that creates a rotational motion at the top of this foot, and that tibia and fibia bone start to rotate a little bit, and that rotates the knee and that rotate the femur, and that goes all the way to the hip, and boom, you have essentially this chain reaction. Oh, man, that’s a lot of motion. And that’s a lot of information really quick atcha. But if that doesn’t happen, if you don’t get that spinning effect, guess what doesn’t get activated, just to guess what doesn’t get awoken and powered up to ready to go. Glutes, oh, the glute muscles, those big old beasts back down there. Those guys are huge powerhouses. And they essentially are the one of the players not the only player. But one of the biggest players in decelerating our body when it hits the front foot hits the ground. And if those guys don’t do their job, well, not only do you have a flat but but also you don’t have the ability to D salary, or put the brake pedals on for you to slow yourself down. And then control and then bring yourself to the next step. So if you don’t have that capacity, it’s like having a sports car with miserable brakes, miserable brakes. And if you’re a sports car enthusiast, you know how important a good set of brakes are. So that’s a big chunk of the pie. But when the foots behind you and you want to push off and propel yourself and go to the next stride. Well, that foot needs the response super well. So essentially, what happens on the other side of that is that when you’re about to push off, the bones are not spun in, but the bone is spun out. And that’s why it’s important to understand that the foot is this multifaceted joint that needs to be able to do both. And we should train it to do both when appropriately and through progressions. And when that can’t happen, right? When we can’t do that and don’t have access, right, that’s the key phrase when our foot doesn’t have access to both pronation and supination. And a little bit of both. And a lot of both, we start to have issues in the area. Because when that foot doesn’t move, guess what also doesn’t move the tibia and the fibula, and the tibia fibia, they don’t, when they don’t move, they can’t move the knee joint as effectively from the bottom up. And that hasn’t happened in the femur bone, that doesn’t move very, very, very much. And when the femur bone doesn’t move very much at all, man, now we’re talking about the hip joint not moving very much. And that’s when we start to get into some serious problems when the chain goes all the way up that high. And we start to have that hip not helping out. And we have a few things that start to elicit from that. And that those few things are essentially plantar fasciitis. And there’s two major types. One when the foot is landing on the ground, you have more kind of heel pain. And then the other one is when you push off the ground, you have that kind of arch pain, right? Massive issues happen when that segment doesn’t move very, very well. And I’m gonna say this flat out, it’s more than likely not the footfall. If you’re treating the foot, if you’re curling some towels and you’re moving marbles, hey, you’re doing a good job strengthen the foot area. But honestly, you’re really not looking at where the problem is coming from. And only focus on where the problem is more than that on a different story when I talk about how to treat plantar fasciitis in a certain way of doing it in a video right up there, so you can check that out. And you’ll see how the hip is the major player or a major suspect in plantar fasciitis.
Now we can also talk about things like Achilles tendinitis, when we talk about things like arthritis, or we’re talking about bunions, are we talking about all these different things that happen? The foot gets blamed for these things, but it’s really a chain reaction of how the foot interfaces with the ground and how the hip and the leg and the even the opposite leg really are players into how that foot is a total piece of this massive system and needs to be this total kind of polarized person if it had its own personality, and how it should be dynamically adaptable to both situations, so you got to train your foot to do that. Now the footage is one part of a very big system of biomechanics. To be able to integrate what you learned today, it helps to understand how the rest of the body’s biomechanics works, which is why we’ve created a whole course on biomechanics. In this course we cover, the mechanics of the whole body explained things like how the left foot and its dysfunctions can affect the thoracic spine, and how you can go about addressing that. So if you want to really dive deep into the whole biomechanical system, please check out our mini courses or a signature course called the multi dimensional movement coaching program. I’ll leave links in the description below for you check it out. If you have any questions about what I’ve covered in this video, please drop them in the comments below so I can get to those and answer them for you. And if you found value in this content, please like and subscribe to keep getting more content from me and the Janaza team. And see you guys next time.
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