If there’s one thing I learned about my body as a dancer, it’s don’t take your feet for granted.
Your feet are more than just slabs of meat that provide the contact between your legs and the floor. They are a fascinating (to me), complex and surprisingly crucial part of the way we interact with the floor and how our ENTIRE body moves.
I thought I appreciated the importance of the feet when I was a ballerina. After all, we spend our entire training phase focusing on getting our feet to articulate properly in all kinds of ways to create the movements and shapes we are going for. Then we put ourselves on our tiptoes in pointe shoes to elongate our lines.
After having an injury to one of my feet as a salsa dancer I began the journey to becoming a foot health enthusiast. I was well suited to ballet partly because of my naturally high arches, which created the lines ballet audiences are looking for. And I was no stranger to the aches and pains of dancing on the tips of our toes. But what I didn’t realize when I started training heavily in salsa was the beating our feet can take when we dance in high heels.
That injury began a journey to where I am today (which you can read about in a previous blog post) as an Anatomy in Motion practitioner and movement therapist. Anatomy in Motion (AiM) is a method of interviewing your body and seeing what it is able to do and not able to do and reintroducing those movements to your body. One of the main places of emphasis in AiM is reintroducing the proper movement of the joints in your feet which has a profound impact on the way the rest of our body moves. If your foot joints aren’t moving as they should, there’s a safe bet the rest of your body is also not moving as it should. Common sources of pain in our bodies comes from less than ideal movement patterns that we’ve chosen to adopt often because we are avoiding moving into something that is or once was painful.
I took the AiM training in March of 2018 and since discovering the program shortly after my injury, I’ve been learning about foot care and foot health. What I have to share today are a few of the things I’ve learned that can benefit dancers of all modalities.
Spend time barefoot
There’s lots of evidence that the fact that we spend so much time in shoes that aren’t shaped like our feet, that restrict the natural joint actions and try to ‘fix’ common movement problems means that we’ve lost touch with how our feet are meant to move. In the past we used to walk around in shoes that essentially just protected our soles from the elements and on surfaces that were mostly uneven. Nowadays our shoes are advanced pieces of technology that do more harm than good (think high heels, runners with ‘supportive’ insoles and orthotics to ‘retrain’ our feet). And our mostly even surface environment doesn’t challenge our feet and ankles to respond to a variety of stimuli. No wonder people have bunions, pronation issues, lack of joint mobility and can’t squat properly. If there’s one piece of advice I can give about foot joint health it’s spend more time barefoot and on uneven surfaces, like hiking on rugged terrain. For more information about barefoot training check out The Foot Collective based on Toronto.
Don’t train only in heels or shoes
When I became serious about salsa I started taking every class and doing every rehearsal in heels. It came from a place of ego. I was thinking ‘as a serious salsa dancer I’m going to look the part and I deserve to dance in heels as an intermediate dancer!’ Boy, was that a bad decision. Not only did it mean I was putting unnecessary pressure on the bones in the balls of my feet but it meant that my feet never got to train how to properly articulate with the floor and create the efficient weight shifts required to be a stable follow. I recall one of the American salsa professionals saying to his class at a workshop that he never allows his beginner dancers to dance in heels until they’ve mastered proper weight transfer and use of the floor with their feet. I couldn’t agree more. After I healed from my injury it took me several months to be strong enough in my feet to return to heels. I took it slowly. Nowadays, as a teacher I rarely wear heels. I teach in Taygra flats (www.taygra.shoes) that don’t have any heel rise and are super flexible and roomy so that all the joints in my feet can do what they were meant to do. When I was training with the teams I wore my flats while I learned the routines and only trained in heels the few weeks before we went to debut. It’s a decision I stand by and it made all the difference in my foot health.
Look for street shoes that don’t have a heel lift
In the footwear world there’s a term called ‘zero drop’. It refers to having no heel lift in the back of your shoes but allowing the heel (and the whole length of the foot) to sit level with the ground. In the running world, it’s believed that runners wearing shoes with heavily cushioned and slightly elevated heels is the source of some running injuries. For a dancer, spending time in heels or point shoes or any other kind of dance shoe that restricts the natural movement of the foot and ankle means all that studio time with your joints wishing they could move as they are meant to. This is why I have chosen shoes that have as much flexibility as possible and, when I need to replace mine, I will always seek zero drop shoes. If you’re in Vancouver, I’ve had people recommend Distance Runwear (www.distancerunwear.com) for shoe options.
Get acquainted with your feet
How often do you check our what’s going on with your feet? Maybe when something is going wrong you inspect them or go see a doctor. But how much time do you spend actually finding out what your feet should be doing and whether they’re doing it? Speaking broadly, your foot is supposed to be able to do two main things: pronate and supinate. Pronation is where the arch of the foot collapses when we put weight on our leg. Supination is where the inside face of the foot shortens to create a solid structure to push off from. Being able to do both of these well and transition easily from one to another is crucial for good foot health and overall body mechanics. You may have heard of people talking about ‘fallen arches’ or avoiding being stuck in ‘evil pronation’. Well, this comes from a misunderstanding of the role of pronation. Sure, you don’t want to be stuck in pronation so you can’t find supination. The usual ‘cure’ for fallen arches or overpronation is to restrict the movement of your feet so you can’t pronate. The problem with restricting the movement of the foot like this is it prevents the ENTIRE body from moving optimally. Read that again. THE ENTIRE BODY. I encourage you to take a look down at your feet when you bend and straighten your knees and see whether both your feet are able to pronate and supinate. (If you’re curious, I made a video on this topic that you can find on my Facebook page www.facebook.com/flowmovementtherapy.)
Give them the rest they need
Feet are just like the rest of your body. Lots of bones and joints, nerves, tendons, ligaments and muscles and all that good stuff. They get tired. They get overworked in certain areas and underworked in other areas. Feet are prone to stress fractures especially when our shoes or dance techniques (pointe shoes, ballroom heels, latin position, demipointe!) put stress on certain joints that usually don’t take as much pressure. So, give your feet a rest. Let them heal between training sessions. Pamper them.
Just for fun, try spending time rolling around on the floor or learning to handstand
Recently I’ve chosen to pull back on my time in the studio and do less salsa dancing. Partly this is a choice to focus more energy on my business but partly it’s because I’ve learned that there are certain ways of moving that are completely foreign to me. Foreign means I need to work on them! I’ve been inspired by other Anatomy in Motion practitioners who spend time learning how to do handstands. We spend so much of our time learning to walk the best way we can and help our clients do the same but how well are we able to balance on our hands, stack our spines efficiently in a foreign configuration and keep breathing while we do it? I was also inspired by the humbling experience of being unable to efficiently go from standing to floor to standing in a routine I was learning. I discovered that being able to do a deep squat, being able to move around on the floor and get up from the floor quickly are all connected. I discovered a practice called Animal Flow which teaches just that. And that’s my next movement challenge!