Heal your freaked out feet with Pilates while you walk!

As you must have noticed over the years, I have bunions!

Years of point shoes in a day before they knew that you should wait until after the foot has finished growing before torturing it in a shoe that allows you to walk around on the tops of your toes!

Well, Joseph Pilates was very familiar with the various foot conditions from which many dancers suffer: Bunions, hammer toes, broken bones, twisted ankles, crooked toes, bent toes, carbuncles, blisters, calluses, neuromas, etc.

We live in a time where most women collect shoes and think nothing of squishing their feet into a Manolo Blahnik shoe that while it might look beautiful was never designed for good foot posture or movement!!!

Your foot has over 28 bones and over 30 joints. It is the basis of our postural alignment and quickly passes along any dysfunction or misalignment up the chain through the ankle, knee, hip and into the neck.

As you walk there is a correct 3 step mechanism. You start with placing your heel onto the ground. As you push forward your foot articulates through the arch and your metatarsals from where it "toes off" just in time for the other foot to place its heel down.

As you can imagine it is important to have a healthy foot and ankle alignment: a strong heel, flexible Achilles tendon, strong ankle, a wide and balanced metatarsal breadth, and straight toes that can articulate through each joint with the big toe as leader of the pack.

Bunions throw off the whole process causing you to have to compensate for the weakness in the main big toe joint. Bent, crooked and hammer toes not only hurt but disturb the "toe off" process. Calluses and corns are the long term effect of repeated chafing in shoes that don�t fit and neuromas come from fallen arches and pronation of your foot as you walk.

BUNION

 

My mother was an advocate of Hush Puppies! How I longed for those fancy Mary-Jane's that all my girl friends were allowed to wear but she passed along an awareness of the importance of good shoes and correct foot care for which today I am grateful.

Have you seen products on the market that separate your toes? I have every kind and while I understand the benefit of adding space between my toes to prevent chafing, remove blisters, correct toe alignment and enhance balance and correct foot mechanics, I find most of them to be awkward, uncomfortable and impractical. Who has time to sit for hours, unable to move, while some gel separates your toes?

In yoga there are beneficial results from interlacing your fingers with your toes, however just try it! I must have fat fingers because trying to get any finger in between 2 toes takes enormous effort!! Perhaps I am simply finger/toe compromised!

Along comes lighterliving Foot Therapy Slippers and Sandals. They look like a flip flop but dont be fooled. They actually encourage toe separation while you wear them as slippers or in nicer weather out door shoes. The small arch support encourages correct foot mechanics and the sloped sole gently adds separation as you walk. Finally an easy way to help heal some of those annoying foot issues AND they surprisingly double as an amazingly efficient and comfortable pedicure shoe.

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