Painful back, hip, knee, ankle or feet?

If you have ever suffered from lower back pain or leg pain, this may help you.

Fitness should start from the ground up.

One of the most common things I see is collapsed arches, which often progress on to ankle, knee and even back pain.

As you may possibly have worked out, I’m a massive fan of barefoot style shoes that allow for natural foot and toe function, like Vibram 5 Finger. I’ve been wearing them since June 2010 and before that I had pretty bad arch pain ( it felt like my arches were tearing ), due to flat feet. I experienced pain that would stop me dead in my tracks.

Changing my footwear made drastic improvements.
I won’t go as far as saying it was just down to changing my footwear, because I changed many aspects of my exercise routine at that time, such as including more Core Stability Work.

Proof?
I’m not sure we could call it good enough proof, however, over the last few years I’ve asked everyone that I’ve bumped into wearing Vibram 5 Finger, the same questions:

1. How have they helped you?
2. Would you go back to the shoes you wore before?

All of them have had positive things to say, such as:

• Alleviated, lower back issues and pain.
• Reduced or cured hip and knee pain.

Hang on a second though, shoes offer support right?
Who says you need support? Are you telling me that a few hundred thousand years of evolution are wrong and actually our bio-mechanics are way off?
The reason why you need support is because your feet have been weaken due to all the years of support (they are not ever going to get stronger). This is of course great news for the producers of trainers!

You have toes for a reason.
Why the hell would you want to bind your toes tightly together stopping them functioning as they were designed to do so, which is to spread out and distribute your weight.
Your toes spread out to give your foot stability and to distribute your weight, so your new pair of “New Balance” don’t exactly help you balance!

Running on hard surfaces mean you need some form of cushioning to reduce impact, WHY?
As if our pavement are harder than anything we evolved running on, dry river or lake beds comes to mind!

When you run, it should be your toes and forefoot that touch the ground first. The calves is a powerful muscle for a reason, it decelerates your impact and acts like a spring to propel you forward.

Walking is a different mode of moving so that’s when and only when you should be placing your heels down first and rolling down the entire length of the foot.

Someone is making lots of money selling these so called “High Tech Trainers” and equally there’s a whole other industry making a packet out of providing pain relief and support with a low tech solution!

Perhaps its worth a rethink?

Where to buy them from:
Vibram Five fingers are actually quite hard to get hold of ( they are not trendy enough ) however Sportpursuit is the best company I’ve found in the UK so far for reliability and price.