Find Your Center: How Your Feet Affect Your Entire Body

This concept might be difficult to wrap your head around, but that pain you’re experiencing in your hip, or even in your shoulder, could be originating from your feet! No matter where in your body you’re experiencing pain, during your assessment, I’ll start from the foot up. I’ll pay close attention to your feet while you’re standing still and when you’re in motion. Observing your feet may not seem relevant to your pain, but I promise you, it is! Allow me to explain: 

Why start at the feet

To me, being pain-free means feeling grounded and centered within your body, and in order to feel grounded, we need to start from the ground up (even if the pain you’re experiencing isn’t in your feet). With any structure, the strongest part is the base, or the foundation, right? It’s no different with the human body. 

Anatomy in Motion

To assess and treat your pain, I’ll use a technique called Anatomy in Motion (AIM), which was created by Gary Ward, a movement expert based in the UK. The AIM approach is all about assessing and correcting your body’s alignment from the ground up. As practitioners, we can learn a lot about your body just by observing your stationary stance and your gait cycle, or the way you walk. Your gait cycle begins when one foot contacts the ground, and it ends when that same foot contacts the ground again. So basically, it includes all of the muscle and joint movements, big and small, that occur in between each step. During this cycle, I assess your feet by looking at how they are positioned, how your toes move or don’t move, how you shift your weight, and how your feet strike the ground while walking. 

These observations allow me to determine how your feet are affecting the rest of your body. When one joint or muscle is not moving properly, it’s likely that other joints or muscles along the same path are not moving properly either, which can lead to muscle imbalance and pain. 

Treatment

The good news is, together, we can correct misalignment within the body! Once I have an idea of what the root cause is, I can develop a customized plan to get your body back into alignment and pain free. This plan will include a combination of simple exercises and manual therapy that will retrain your muscles and joints to function properly. There is a possibility that you’ll be given some movement homework, but I promise it will be worth it. 

As a massage therapist and movement practitioner, my main goal is to help you achieve pain-free movement. I want my clients to feel grounded and centered, which is why I love the Anatomy in Motion approach. It allows my clients to find their center and correct the misalignments that have been causing them pain. If you’re ready to get back to pain-free movement, connect with me. I’d be happy to help you schedule an appointment, or answer any questions you may have.