Correct Foot Mechanics - Foot Neuromuscular Retraining

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Video Transcription:
Welcome back to Foundation Physical Therapy’s UA-cam Channel. Today we’re going to go over some coordination or neuromuscular training of the foot and ankle. This is for anybody who wants to prevent any tightness in the heel cord or in your calves. Or it helps prevent shin splints. Basically what it does is it exposes if you’re using your foot correctly when you’re on the ground. The drill is learning how to use the appropriate muscles to pull the ankle up without compensating from the toes. As a well as to point the foot down without compensating from the toes. It’s pretty interesting little drill that you can do in any seated position in any chair. What you want to try to do is to actually curl the toes and lift the foot up. The common compensation that people will pull up with the toes like this. The problem when you pull up with your toes like this is you’re not using the primary muscle to lift the foot. That can lead to dysfunctions while you’re running walking, training, anything like that. Which can lead to chronic tightness in the calf which can lead to Achilles tendinitis things like that. So again it’s a pretty interesting little drill. You’re going to grip the toes down and then pull the foot up. Then you’re switch that up. You’re going to push the foot down and pull the toes up. Then what you try to do is get proficient at going back and forth between the two because to some extent that’s what’s going to happen during a normal gait cycle. So its something easy to try and if you find that you’re very weak in here and can’t do this then what you can do is just keep the toes holding down and then work on pumping the foot up and down which is a very challenging exercise. You can start by setting a timer for a very short period of time and do that for about 30 seconds to 1 minute. If you’re doing that correctly you’ll definitely feel that muscle here on the anterior side of your leg start to work. So its something that can help for runners who feel just like their lower leg isn’t moving well enough.