Advanced Foot Position

This article from 2012 was lightly edited and updated for new resources in 2020. If you're interested in feet, check out Our Favorite Feet, Footwear, and Walking Resources.

I just got back from teaching an intensive week of teaching advanced alignment and I cannot explain how intense and fun and eye (and hip!) opening this week is. This is the first time I've done it being 31 weeks pregnant. It was good times.

At the end of the week, those who hadn't flown out got up early to take a 10-mile walk over various terrain. You could spot us coming because we all had "strange footwear" on.

See?

Can you guess which ones are my feet? Hint: I had to back my hips up to keep my big belly from obscuring the view. Here's another picture, detectives:

During this week, I taught an hour-long advanced course on the foot and how it relates to the lower leg, knee, hip, and pelvic floor. Foot and ankle motions typically listed are plantar- and dorsiflexion, inversion, eversion, pronation and supination, but what's missing are names of movements for how the foot should move relative to itself. It's likely we don't have these words because we don't have these movements due to how we've used our feet as a culture.

If you have read Simple Steps to Foot Pain Relief or Whole Body Barefoot or even Stance, then you know how to adjust your feet "forward" as opposed to turning them out. When I'm limited to a word count, it's easiest to tell you to line up the outside edges of the foot. And this does in a pinch, but there are actually more specific points on the foot's skeleton that are more accurate, especially if you are the owner of some curvy feet (see "schmear" in Whole Body Barefoot).

For those of you wondering how to line up wavy lateral borders of the foot, here's the first section of my foot class.

 

If you've read about Shank Rotation in Move Your DNA, here's a (sideways) video on how to mobilize that lower leg (shank).

If you want in-depth exercise instruction on your feet, knees and hips, check out Simple Steps to Foot Pain Relief, Whole Body Barefoot, and our video course Nutritious Movement Improvement: Your 12-Week Body Boost.