by Mitch Hauschildt, MA, ATC, CSCS
Geographically, the brain and the foot don’t get any further apart. Despite the distance, the foot and brain are intertwined to provide constant feedback to each other and the combination ultimately shapes how we move.
A few years ago, training without shoes or with minimus style soles became the craze. It became a polarizing topic among health and fitness professionals. The traditionalists said that you need to stay in your big, soft, motion control shoes while a new group of people argued that shoes were causing most of what ails us physically.
I personally leaned towards shoes for a long time. Over the years, I have had a lot of success with high quality running shoes and orthotic inserts and I wasn’t real excited to move away from that success. Its never easy to change and as the old adage says, “don’t fix what ain’t broken.” That’s basically how I viewed it.
When I researched the concept of barefoot training, the arguments made sense, but I had some trouble completely buying into the concept that a few millimeters of “drop” and the ability to spread your toes out really makes that big of a difference. It does make sense conceptually, but is it enough to offset an injury risk for people who have never trained that way before? That’s where I was stuck. I couldn’t justify walking away from what I had known for a number of years in order to follow something that I didn’t know for sure if I would be that impactful.
Not long after the barefoot craze gained some steam, I began to learn more about the nervous system and how we can facilitate the brain to improve movement in healthy athletes, injured patients and even the chronically ill. I began to look for new ways that I could tap into the brain to change motor patterns and ultimately improve one’s performance (whatever their goals may be). I began to look at the foot differently than I had before.
Something that made a lot of sense to me is that the hand and the foot are a lot alike. They obviously have 5 digits, need similar levels of stability and mobility, and get a lot of wear and tear. But, they also both have a lot of nerve endings which can provide a lot of feedback to the body through the skin. The feet are essentially the “hands” of the legs.
There is an incredible amount of feedback you get through your hands, fingertips and palms. Without our hands, we would miss out on all kinds of cues from the world around us that shape how we think, act and move. Think about how much less you can do and feel when you wear a thick pair of ski gloves. If you wear those gloves all day, every day, over time, your hands would become less and less effective at feeding the brain with information.
This is essentially what is happening with your feet in soft, spongy shoes. Keeping your feet sheltered all day, every day, essentially dumbs them down neurologically. When I began to look at the neurological feedback that can occur at the foot, barefoot training suddenly made a lot more sense. The amount of feedback is illustrated well by the Homunculus Man. This picture illustrates the amount of sensory feedback that comes to the brain through the various parts of the skin.
Notice that a large amount of feedback comes through both the hands and the feet. By impacting the extremities, we can truly impact the brain.
Because of this concept, I now train my athletes without their shoes frequently. I also encourage them to wear minimus style shoes in their daily lives if they are open to it. By feeling every crack, every rock, every blade of grass, or fiber of carpet, they can stimulate their nervous system consistently and effectively over and over throughout the day. Over time, the nervous system will become more efficient, making movements more clean, fluid and rhythmical. The feet become “smarter.”
This isn’t to say that I promote barefoot training in every circumstance. I only encourage it at times where the patient can control their foot function, especially if they are an over pronator. For the vast majority of people, running, jumping, planting and cutting should be done in traditional athletic shoes. But for lifting, therapy, correctives, and ADLs, I now believe that because of the nervous system impact, the more we can do barefoot or in minimus shoes, the better we will move over time.
Its time to do what our friends around the world are doing everyday and forget the shoes and make our feet smart again.
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