How Your Feet Affect Your Posture

Hey city-dwellers! Are you getting out of the concrete jungle this summer? Not only might time away from your computer be good for your posture, but your feet might thank you for a vacation from walking on concrete.

Even if you don't live in a big city, odds are that you spend most of your time walking on flat surfaces and a lot of time in shoes.

Did you know that each of your feet has 26 bones and 33 joints? If you're trying to improve your posture and the joints in your feet are stiff, you're missing an important art of the picture.

Wearing restrictive shoes, walking on flat surfaces most of the time, and even tensing our feet when doing sedentary tasks like typing or reading can get our feet acting more like fused blocks attached to our ankles. This affects how we stand, sit, move, breathe, and even how we speak. If our feet our tight and narrowed, we're not using their full surfaces for balance and then muscles further up (in the thighs, back, neck and shoulders) will often compensate to keep us from falling as if we were standing/walking on stilts or ice skates.

Try this check-in with your feet...
Stand in your bare feet and see if you can notice where you feel the most pressure. Is it spread out evenly? Mostly in the heels? The balls of the feet? Are you more on the insides or outsides of your feet. Is what you feel in your left foot the same as the right?

If you're mostly on your heels or the balls of the feet, the insides or outsides, then you're doing some extra work to hold yourself up.

I hope you'll be off to the beach at some point this summer or somewhere where you can walk barefoot in sand or grass...or even hiking with shoes on. Walking on varied terrain is good for our feet and good for our posture and movement. When you walk on something bumpy or uneven, all of those joints in your feet suddenly have a chance to wake up and move!