Dentists have trained us well to visit them on a regular basis for a check-up, rather than waiting until things start to hurt. Hylton Menz, a professor of podiatry at La Trobe University in Melbourne, wishes we’d do the same for our feet.
“We probably ignore our feet relative to other parts of our body, because we stick them in shoes and they’re a long way away, so we tend to forget about feet,” he says. “It’s only really when they don’t actually function properly – so when they become painful, they don’t do what we want them to do – that we really think about them.”
About one quarter of all the bones in our body are in our feet, connected by 33 joints and more than 100 tendons and ligaments. Our feet are marvels of engineering, but we tend to treat them like a neglected cart horse. Experts tell us how we can give the foot some much-needed care.
Sensible shoes
“The worst ankle injury I have ever seen was a woman in her early 20s who had got very inebriated wearing four-inch heels, and she fell off her heel and she destroyed her ankle,” says physiotherapist Dr Kathryn Mills, from Kensington Physiotherapy and Macquarie University in Sydney. She says ankle injuries tend to increase in the silly season, thanks to a combination of party shoes and alcohol.
The Venn diagram of fashion and foot health overlap by a slim margin, but when it comes to looking after our feet and ankle health, we need to decide which of those two circles we value more. Physiotherapist Dr Jillian Eyles, from the University of Sydney, advises choose health. “Stuffing your feet into pointy-toe shoes and wearing high heels all the time is probably not going to be great for your feet and your ankles,” she says.
Find the right shoe for you
What constitutes the right footwear varies enormously according to age, activity and personal preference, according to Menz. “It’s important that that shoes are actually shaped like your foot, which sounds obvious, but a lot of shoes aren’t,” he says.
Shoes should also bend where the foot bends, around the ball of the foot, Menz says, which will make them more comfortable. But comfort isn’t always an indicator that a shoe is good for your needs. Elderly people, for example, might find a thick, soft sole more comfortable, but that will also be less stable and could increase the risk of falls. Instead, they should choose a thinner firmer-soled shoe, so they are better able to feel the ground, and also look for slip-resistant soles. Similarly, slip-on shoes might be easier to put on, but they also hold the foot less securely, which can also increase the risk of falls.
It’s also important to vary your footwear, says Mills. “What you want to do is have as many pairs of shoes as you can afford and rotate between them, in terms of your physical activity shoes, because different shoes will do different things.”
Watch your weight
Our entire body weight rests on the soles of our feet, so maintaining a healthy weight is an important part of looking after our feet.
It’s not just for mechanical reasons but also metabolic, Menz says. “There’s really good evidence now that adipose tissue – fat tissue – is active stuff, so it tends to become activated on nerve endings, so there’s a really strong link between foot pain and being overweight,” he says. “There’s lots of benefits to having a healthy body weight, and one of the benefits is you’re far less likely to get foot pain.”
We spend so much time on our feet yet rarely think of them as a body part that needs exercising. But there are some foot exercises that can help maintain the big and small muscles in the foot that are critical for balance and movement.
“Even some simple things, like trying to form an arch with your foot, so keeping your toes on the ground and trying to lift up your arch, helps to engage those deeper muscles in your foot,” says Assoc Prof Natalie Collins, a sports and exercise physiotherapist at the University of Queensland. She also suggests doing calf raises – rising up on to the ball of the foot – to strengthen the foot, ankle and lower limb.
Mills adds that standing on a towel and trying to scrunch it up into a ball with your toes, or trying to move your big toe independently out about half a centimetre from the other toes and back in, are both good activities to strengthen the muscles that go from the outside of the foot inwards.
