Stationary support provides a solid base for your feet and the muscles, joints, and limbs above your feet to work from. In contrast, dynamic spring uses the joints of your feet as mobile, elastic, power-producing structures. Squatting and deadlifting movements from the floor need a strong base in the form of stationary support, while the more dynamic running, jumping, and skipping movements require the power and efficiency of dynamic spring.

From squats to double unders, training your feet is the first step to accessing your full athletic potential.

There are more complex movements that use both stationary support and dynamic spring. Weighted carries, for example, need a lot more stationary support from the feet than walking and running, but also need to utilise dynamic spring for forward progression. Olympic weightlifting uses stationary support in the first pull, before harnessing dynamic spring in the second pull and switching back to stationary support in the catch.

Harnessing the power of your stationary support and dynamic spring in your training will improve your performance exponentially. This article will teach you how to isolate and train these foot functions to maximise stationary support and dynamic spring for performance and injury prevention.

Stationary Support

Stationary support describes a strong, rigid foot structure that connects your body firmly and safely to the ground and gives the muscles, joints, and limbs above your feet a solid base to work from. Failure of your feet to achieve stationary support when squatting, deadlifting, pressing, or landing from a jump will result in added strain to muscles, tendons, and joints further up the body.

All thirty-three of your foot joints need to be locked tight to form a strong base for stationary support with a rigid arch. Many athletes I see try to achieve a rigid arch for stationary support by lifting their big toe joint off the ground. This is a mistake as it dramatically reduces the required stability from the foot. For stationary support, the foot arch needs to be rigid, with the big toe joint and big toe firmly pressed on the ground. It’s about having a strong arch, not a high arch.

An Active Arch for a Strong Arch

The Active Arch/Lazy Arch is the exercise I recommend for training a strong foot arch.

The Active Arch/Lazy Arch can be performed anytime during the day, and ideally should be performed more than once a day. There’s no set prescription for sets, repetitions, or time held. The Active Arch/Lazy Arch just needs to be performed often enough for your body to learn what a strong arch feels like to achieve solid stationary support for your strength-based training.

Take a look at the video below and read the instructions on how to do the Active Arch/Lazy Arch.

1. Start with your feet underneath your hips, pointing either straight ahead or at the 11 o’clock and 1 o’clock position as per the layout of numbers on a clock face.
2. Allow your foot to be relaxed and sloppy, letting them collapse right in. This is the Lazy Arch position.
3. Pull the middle of your arch up to make your foot tight, strong, and rigid. Ensure your big toe joint and big toe are still firmly on the ground. This is the Active Arch position.
4. Hold the Active Arch position for 5 seconds, then slump your foot back into Lazy Arch.
5. Repeat this process as often as possible throughout the day.

The Active Arch/Lazy Arch exercise is an essential starting point to achieve strong stationary support in your feet. If you can’t achieve a good Active Arch position comfortably with just bodyweight on your feet, don’t even think about adding load and volume to your feet in the squat rack. While your feet may survive squatting with a Lazy Arch foot position, your knees certainly won’t.

Dynamic Spring

Dynamic spring uses the joints of your foot as mobile, elastic, power-producing structural mechanisms. Harnessing dynamic spring from your feet will increase power, performance capacity, and endurance when walking, running, or taking off from a jump. Conversely, a lack of dynamic spring will leak power and efficiency and place added strain and stress on the Achilles tendon, tibialis posterior tendon, and calf and hamstring muscles. An athlete can’t afford not to have dynamic spring.

Train the Spring with a Hop

I like to train dynamic spring with an exercise I call Bunny Hops. Bunny Hops are effectively skipping without a rope.

Below is a video of the Bunny Hops exercise performed in slow motion. Note that you need to perform Bunny Hops as quietly as possible. You should be able to do Bunny Hops on wooden floorboards outside a sleeping baby’s bedroom and not wake the child up.

1. Do the Bunny Hops without your shoes on, as their effectiveness is dramatically reduced by the cushioning materials found in most footwear.
2. The balls of your feet and toes should come off the ground just a small amount, and your heels need to lightly contact the ground with every hop. Allowing the heels to lightly contact the ground uses the entire foot complex to load the elastic spring of the arch.
3. Once you have loaded the elastic spring of the foot arch, you can effortlessly recoil up off the ground for the next repetition.

Perform Bunny Hops as a 10 second drill, repeated regularly when you can, as much as you can. Once proficient with Bunny Hops, add a skipping rope. As your feet move your body up and down, you also have to turn the rope with your wrist, and you might find your feet thud and crash to the ground. Maintain quiet, stealth-like foot movement while having to swing the rope to train your coordination and proprioception. Do 5 seconds of Bunny Hops followed by 10 seconds of skipping, and repeat regularly until the sound of your feet is identical between the two exercises. Use a noisy surface underneath your feet for feedback. A loud contact surface effectively determines whether your feet are functioning as dynamic springs or thudding bricks.

Athletic Performance Starts with Foot Awareness

A huge element of what I do as a podiatrist is to create awareness of human feet and how they function. This awareness leads to athletes being able to make better decisions in respect to their feet. Whether you need to train stationary support, dynamic spring, or a combination of both, feet with healthy function in these two areas are an asset to your sport and life in general.

Your feet are one of the biggest resources for training gains and injury prevention. By training stationary support and dynamic spring, you’re taking the first step to tapping into that resource.

More Like This:

• It’s the 23 Hours a Day You’re Not Running That Count
• Why There’s No Such Thing as Flat Feet
• Why You Should Skip Your Jogging Warm Up
• New on Breaking Muscle

Photo courtesy of Rx’d Photography

The post 2 Essential Foot Functions to Upgrade Your Training appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

But have you seen a photo or video of your running posture in the latter half of your run? You might often look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame wearing a 100-pound weight vest.

Fatigue can bring out the worst postures in runners.

If you were to look like this doing deadlifts or squatting, hopefully somebody in the gym would tap you on the shoulder and politely tell you how awful your technique is, and how likely you are to injure yourself. Unfortunately, the tap on the shoulder rarely occurs in running. Instead, there is a barrage of injuries that constantly beat you down.

Why the Other 23 Hours A Day Count

Have you ever considered the way you stand when you brush your teeth could lead to shin splints? Or your knee pain when running could be caused by staring at your phone while waiting in line for your coffee?

Rather than focusing on good posture for just an hour each day while you’re running, you need to practice strong, healthy joint positions the other 23 hours of each day too. I like to refer to these 23 hours as a dress rehearsal for how you want to look when running, as once fatigue sets in, you will fall into the posture your body accepts as “normal”.

My two biggest drivers of strong, efficient posture are head and foot position.

Postural Driver #1: The Head

Despite being a podiatrist, I always start with the position of the head. This is for two reasons. The first reason is because it is heavy. The big round bowling ball we call our head is designed to sit stacked above our torso. When your head drifts forward whilst standing, walking, or running, you have to counter this weight imbalance with your pelvis. As your butt drifts out behind you to offset your head being in front of your centre of gravity, your pelvis rotates anteriorly, and your glutes switch off. So your glute “weakness” when running may not be muscle failure – it may simply be position failure.

Try this simple test to understand how your pelvis position dramatically affects your glute activation.

1. Stand tall with your feet underneath your hips.
2. Squeeze your butt cheeks together tightly, like there is a $100 bill between them.
3. Relax your glutes, stick your butt out behind you, then try again to squeeze your glutes.
4. Notice how your glutes do not work nearly as well in this position.

You need to be mindful of keeping your head back on your shoulders to use your glute and torso muscles most effectively. Doing so regularly means your head will keep this position under fatigue. It’s way more effective than doing 1000 glute bridges a day only to have crappy head posture render those muscles useless anyway.

The second reason head position is so important is ground impact force when walking and running. As your head rolls forward into your “phone text messaging” position, your eyes become fixated on the ground almost directly in front of your feet. When you walk and run, this tends to direct your impact force more vertically and less horizontally. I like to refer to this as burrowing into the ground as you run, rather than gliding across the surface of it as you should. I find eye position to be a large factor in how heavy my patients and clients contact the ground.

It’s one of many factors influencing impact forces when we are active, but it is an easy one to modify: keep your eyes facing forward. There. You’re already looking more like the runner you want to be.

Postural Driver #2: The Feet

The next step is to think about where your feet should point when you run. I use numbers on a clock to reference where feet point when standing, walking, and running. If your feet are parallel, they point to 12 o’clock. If your feet turn out a little, they point to 11 and 1. Further out still, and they point to 10 and 2.

How your feet point when standing indicates how they will point in motion.

Why is this important? Let’s simplify your running muscle groups into prime movers and stabilisers. Let’s call your calves, hammies, quads, and glutes the prime movers, and the muscles down the sides of your legs, the stabilisers. When your feet point somewhere between 12 o’clock and 11 and 1, your prime movers will be positioned in a way to generate optimum forward progression, while your stabilising muscles can go about their job of adapting, moulding, and controlling inward and outward forces. Put simply, all your leg muscle groups do the job they are designed to do.

Now, as your feet turn out beyond 11 and 1 to 10 and 2, your prime mover muscles end up facing outwards and your stabilising muscles face forwards. This decreases performance capacity from your prime movers and places excess strain on your stabilisers by asking them to act as prime movers. This results in excessive stress on multiple body structures within your feet, ankles, legs, and onwards up the chain.

If you think of your feet as car tyres for your body, you will start to understand the importance of their position for running. If you put your car tyres on at any angle other than parallel, your car will not drive very well. It may move, and if you push the accelerator down hard enough, it may even move fast. But the wear and tear is far greater with every degree the tyres are turned out away from parallel.

There’s No One Size Fits All Here

The car tyre and feet analogy is pretty easy to understand, but human anatomy is not as simple. We have to accept there is no one size fits all for everybody. Not everybody will be in their optimum running performance position with their feet dead parallel. Complexities in bone and joint structure mean some runners will be in a more efficient and powerful foot and limb position with their feet at 11 and 1 compared with pointing to 12 o’clock. That said, I am yet to work with a runner whose optimum foot position sits outside of the 11 and 1 parameter.

“Become aware of where your feet point in the everyday activities and chores of life, as this will more often reflect the position of your feet when you run.”

There are also many activities and sporting endeavours outside of running that require a non-forward foot position, and forcing your feet to be in a parallel position for non-forward direction movements can leak power, energy, and performance for those activities. The rule of individual difference applies there as well, so be mindful with this prescription.

Position Is Power, Efficiency Is Gold

When fresh, running posture can be a chosen, strong position. But when fatigue sets in, running posture is determined by what your body accepts as normal. So if normal for you is head forward, eyes staring at your phone, shoulders slumped, and feet turned out like a duck, then it should not be a surprise that you run this way. As I’ve said before – changing your everyday postural habits is not easy, but the rewards are forever.

Be conscious of your head position and, wherever possible, stick it back on your shoulders where it belongs. Similarly, become aware of where your feet point in the everyday activities and chores of life, as this will more often reflect the position of your feet when you run. Remember: position is power – efficiency is gold. Your position is forged in the 23 hours of the day when you are not running, so start improving it in that time today.

More Like This:

• 3 Progressive Exercises to Correct Pelvic Tilt in Runners
• The Runner’s Guide to Loving Gravity
• Why There’s No Such Thing as Flat Feet
• New on Breaking Muscle

Teaser photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

Photos 1 and 2 courtesy of Tim Bransdon.

Photo 3 courtesy of Sam MacIntosh.

The post It’s the 23 Hours a Day You’re Not Running That Count appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

It is likely you or someone you know, be it a family member, friend, or client, has been struck down with a case of flat feet. “Flat feet” is a term used to explain anything from plantar fascia pain, Achilles injuries, shin splints, knee, hip, and back pain. In other words, almost any physical ailment between the ground and your head. So what, exactly, does flat feet mean? Is it a diagnosis? Is it terminal? And does it even exist?

In fifteen years of practice, I’ve only ever seen one case of flat feet.

True Flat Feet Are Rare

In fifteen years of assessing human feet at my podiatry clinic and at The Running Lab, I have only ever seen one true case of flat feet. Ironically, this individual had not suffered any pain in her forty-two years as a result. Her foot bones were just pancake-flat. It wasn’t a deformity. A small number of people have legitimate deformities due to major injuries or severe arthritis, but this was just how she was made. Her only reason for visiting me was she was sick of people telling her how shocking her flat feet were and that she really needed to see someone about them. Almost every other person I have worked with in my career who claimed to have flat feet have had an arch in their feet.

So why is flat feet such a commonly used term? It’s an expression used to describe feet that collapse under your bodyweight when standing, walking, jumping, or squatting. It denotes the inability of your feet to function correctly. The true diagnosis for so-called flat feet is actually weak and poorly functioning feet.

Orthotics Are Not the Solution

I don’t know of any other body part described as weak and poorly functioning that we would provide long-term artificial support for. People with weak core muscles are not walking around in a corset. Few wear a brace to stop their shoulders and neck slumping forward. In these cases, the logical and often practiced solution is to address the postural, positional, and movement-based weakness.

The longer you artificially support your arches with orthotics, the less your own muscles will be able to do it for you.

The same should be true of flat feet, yet most current treatment options provide artificial support for the foot arch through shoes and orthotics. It seems the easier option, but no artificial bracing will ever substitute the truly amazing power and efficiency of thirty-three strong, healthy, well-tuned foot joints. Think about it. There are twenty muscles within each foot, and another thirteen muscles in each leg that attach into your foot. That makes thirty-three muscles that, when strong and healthy, are designed to support your foot structure and function. Supports may prevent or reduce the collapsing of the arch, but they also interfere with the function of these joints in each foot. This in turn affects every major joint up to your neck.

Supporting weak feet only leads to further weakness. The longer you artificially support your weak collapsing arch, the less your own muscles will be able to do it for you. If flat feet are actually just weak and functioning poorly, then they need to be trained to become more strong and awesome, just like your other body parts.

2 Drills to Strengthen and Train Flat Feet

It’s time you looked at your feet in the same way you look at the rest of your body. If they are weak, strengthen them, and if they lack balance and coordination, train them. The two exercises in this video lay the framework for transforming your feet into powerful springs.

The first exercise strengthens foot posture. In the world of human movement and performance, good everyday position and posture is essential for good movement.

• Practice holding a strong foot arch position as shown in the video in as many everyday chores as possible. Put a note on your bathroom mirror to remind you to control your arch position while brushing your teeth, shaving, doing your hair, or make-up.
• Hold your arch in a strong position while talking with workmates or drinking your morning coffee.
• Eventually, you will not have to consciously think about your arch position, and it will become more natural.

The second exercise is a great way to train foot and ankle stability, balance, and coordination.

• Hold the top position of a calf raise for five seconds before lowering slowly and smoothly for a count of five seconds. The true power of this exercise is dramatically reduced if you are not barefoot.
• Perform five good quality reps, once per day initially, increasing to five reps twice per day as the exercise becomes easier.
• It is absolutely essential the big toe joint (first metatarsal-phalangeal joint) maintains complete control throughout the whole movement. Failure of the big toe leads to a cascade of dysfunction further up the leg and body.

There’s No Shortcut to Strong Feet

Flat feet are a symptom of postural and movement-based dysfunction and weakness, not a diagnosis. Feet respond to training principles in the same way the rest of the body does: too much load or volume too soon will result in injury. Gradual overload with well structured drills and exercise progressions like those above will turn weak, dysfunctional feet into powerful, high octane machines. Remember, there’s no express pass to strong feet. It takes a lot of commitment today, but the rewards are for life.

More Like This:

• Feet Are Our Foundation: 5 Ways to Strengthen Them
• Building on Quicksand: How and Why to Strengthen Your Feet
• Causes and Treatment for Fallen Arches
• New on Breaking Muscle

Photo 1 courtesy of Tim Bransdon.

Photo 2 courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Why There’s No Such Thing as Flat Feet appeared first on Breaking Muscle.