Flexible Feet: For Comfort, Balance, and Speed

By Kim Cottrell

Flexible feet are comfortable and, when treated right, can be comfortable all day long. Flexible feet provide good balance and resilience for all terrains. Flexible feet are nimble and propel you forward without a lot of work from the rest of the body. You can move faster with more confidence and feel great at the end of a long walk.

How do you go about getting comfortable feet?
I won’t be the first person to say, you need bigger shoes with a flatter sole. Dr. Ray McClanahan, podiatrist, and many others are saying the same thing. You don’t have to go barefoot to have a flexible foot, but you do need to be choosy about the shoes you put on your feet. Any work you do to loosen the bones in your foot and ankle will be for naught if you cinch on tight shoes with a heel and go out for your walk. Ouch!

You will know they are too tight if your feet hurt, anywhere. If you are getting blisters, especially on the end of your toes, your shoes are too tight. If you have a neuroma, a tight shoe squeezes your toes together and it hurts. Maybe you can’t make a neuroma go away, but if your shoes are bigger, the pressure won’t be there. If your big toe becomes numb when you walk very far, it’s a sure sign of too much pressure from your shoe and you could develop shoe-induced neuropathy.

There are dozens of other issues that might come up that are indicators that your shoes are just too tight. A foot that is crammed and cinched into a shoe cannot be flexible. It simply cannot. Test by pulling the insert out of your shoe. Stand on it. Note if your toes rest inside or outside the border of the insert. If they are the same size or sprawl past the insert shape, you need a bigger shoe.

If you can walk with balance, your spine can quit clenching.
Flexible feet, as an example toes that have room to move, provide better balance. If you are standing and walking in good balance, your brain will register that as more comfortable and you’ll relax in your shoulders and upper back and walking will be more fun. Some of the shoes with a built-up heel or a turned-up toe, especially the rocker shoes, are not designed for maximum balance. We’re not talking about balance while you are standing still. You need to have good balance while moving. Your walks should be fun and invigorating, not a grind.

On a recent family outing, my 75-year-old mother-in-law expressed interest in a different style of shoes. She’d worn sandals with socks for years and though there wasn’t much of a heel, it was enough to send her sliding toward the front of her shoe and create pressure under the ball of her foot. She felt unsteady and had resorted to using a walker that pushed her even more forward in her stance, no matter how much she tried to stand up straight.

We found her a pair of shoes that were completely flat, with a roomy mesh toe-box, and an elastic strap built into the heel to keep her foot in place. The shoe fit nicely, and I watched for the next couple of days as she became more comfortable and regained confidence in her balance. On the three-block walk to breakfast, she was a little tentative. But on the way home, she was so comfortable that she quit holding someone’s arm to step down from the sidewalk. And, by her report, she experienced a 24-hour period without low-back pain. I tell her story because she had such a dramatic improvement from feeling more balanced.

Flexible feet will bring you speed.
Finally, some of you want speed. Your flexible feet will definitely give you speed. You won’t have to focus on it too much; it will come naturally. Flexible feet step lightly, and light steps don’t take much effort. The emphasis is on the lifting and not on the stepping down. You’ll notice you are propelled lightly forward, with good balance and with a growing sense of effortlessness, and soon you’ll naturally go faster.

Think flexible feet, light feet, light shoes, and good balance. Speed will follow.

Kim Cottrell is a Feldenkrais teacher who walks, lives, and practices in Portland. For more information or to find out about her foot health classes, visit www.kimcottrell.com. In the next article she’ll describe how to get flexible feet.