Foot Stability Is The Foundation For All Your Lifts

Foot stability is the foundation for all your lifts. Therefore, if you are not working on foot stability, you are not working on a solid foundation. If you want to be as strong as possible in your lifts, the first strength leak you need to address is your feet. I’m sure you assess your clients’ lifts regularly. But have you ever assessed their feet? Time to start…

A few days ago, I was filming my Movement Optimization for Prehab and Performance Level 1 Online Course. Yup, just dropped the news… you will soon be able to take the course in the comfort of your home at your own pace! Anyway, I decided to do a live assessment for the course case study. I assessed a client whose main difficulty was with his overhead press. His overall posture showed some thoracic kyphosis, rounded shoulders, slight forward position of the head. Things that could make you jump to the conclusion that he had poor shoulder and thoracic mobility and potentially poor scapular control and that that’s where his difficulty with overhead presses lay.

However, his assessment actually showed good mobility at the shoulder and thoracic spine and no scapular dyskinesis. What we did find was a significant rearfoot valgus and a tendency for the foot to pronate in both single-leg stance and under load.

When we looked at his overhead press, we noticed how difficult it was for him to maintain his center of gravity in the right position. Whenever he would press the barbell up, his weight would shift to the front of his feet due to the excessive pronation. His feet were in a constant struggle to resist that pronation.

We worked on creating awareness of his feet and worked on a couple of foot stability drills and within 5 minutes, we re-tested his overhead press and saw a significant improvement in his stability. Already, he felt more solid with a better transfer of strength to the barbell.

WAKING UP THE FOOT
The first step in improving foot function is getting connected to the foot. Most people spend a lot of time in shoes, and very little time barefoot. If they wear shoes with a very narrow toe box, they often have very little connection with the toes.

An efficient mobilization sequence for the foot involves increasing proprioception by stimulating the bottom of the foot, as well as tapping into movement of the toes.

Cutaneous sensation is closely related to the perception of movement and stability. A study of subjects suffering from diabetic neuropathy found that they required significantly greater passive angular displacement of the ankle in order to perceive movement.

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Barefoot training stimulates the cutaneous mechanoreceptors of the foot. This information, as well as that coming from muscle and joint mechanoreceptors, is used by the nervous system to detect position and movement: this is proprioception.