The Top Three Benefits of Foot/Ankle Adjustments

​Your feet work hard, and with 26 bones in each foot, they are engineered extremely well for walking and running. You usually do this without having to think much about it, walking around Bakersfield, or jogging casually along Kern River Bike Path. However, when things are off kilter and you start experiencing tightness or discomfort in your hips, low back, neck, and shoulders, the secret solution may just rely on having your feet adjusted.

Your feet influence your spine from the ground up. With every step, as you plant your heel to the ground, and you roll forward, your arch has to collapse to absorb energy. Then, when you toe off to push yourself forward, your arch has to go rigid. This transmits forces back into your feet and toes for efficient movement. When things are off in your feet they can cause your posture to compensate for the injury. In turn this leads to a cascading effect across your body. That being said, there are three major benefits to having your feet and ankles adjusted:

• Injury Reduction
• Awareness & Preventative Care
• Living Pain Free

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INJURY REDUCTION

The first benefit is one that I discovered firsthand by working on myself and other fellow runners: Reduction of Injuries. Several years ago I decided to start running after reading Born To Run. I noticed how my feet were stiff and not moving properly. So I started to adjust my own feet to loosen them up so I could run more comfortably. As I started experiencing results, I started adjusting the feet of other local runners and they felt the difference too. The biggest difference the runners noticed was they had less injuries and recovered faster when they got their maintenance adjustments every month.

AWARENESS & PREVENTATIVE CARE

The second best thing about foot and ankle adjusting is understanding and awareness. Foot and ankle muscle work help improve proprioception. You’ll have better awareness of where you are stepping and how you are balancing. You will be grounded, and you will have a better sense of symmetry and balance. Having a bodyworker like me that specializes in extremity work, I will explain how the lack of joint motion in your feet and ankles are contributing to injuries in other parts of your body. I will trace that movement down to your feet and make you more conscious of your body’s ergonomics. After our session, I will give you 1-2 simple corrective movement exercises to help restore proper motion. Knowing this can help you prevent injuries in the future, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

LIVING PAIN FREE

Finally, the most wonderful benefit of foot and ankle health: Living Pain Free. When your feet and ankles are well worked with detailed bodywork, the forces transmitted to your knees and low back are more in line with what your body is naturally designed to do. There’s no funny twist in your knee to compensate for a rigid instep. I often see chronic motions where the heel bone moves in a rolled-in pattern. By performing soft tissue work to the area around the heel bone, those patterns are improved, allowing your foot to point straight ahead. Consequently, this puts less pressure on your low back, sacroiliac, and hip joints.

When things are aligned and you’re moving more naturally, the muscles, joints, and bones work in harmony. Subsequently, this allows them to deliver the right amount of pressure to the right areas. When all the gears in the engine are greased and functioning well the entire motor runs efficiently.

If you are dealing with any tightness or discomfort in the low back, hips, knees, ankles, calves, heels, or arches of the feet, then come for a session, kick your shoes off, and let me take a look!

Cheers to happy feet,
​-Dr. Vice

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