The Foot and Knee Pain

Last week I was reminded of the importance of the foot once again.  Over the past year you may have noticed that I’ve written a few different posts about the foot and exercises for the feet.  We have “Stomping Out Foot Pain with Pilates,” “Recipes for an Agile Foot,” and “Recipes For a Strong and Flexible Ankle” Not to mention the Pilates Exercise of the Day Blog dedicated the entire month of July to foot and ankle exercises.  It may seem that I’m obsessed.  I was even beginning to think so, but then a client came in with a foot question, we went on a foot tangent, and that tangent led to a decrease in her knee pain. 

With this information in mind, I once again started to compose a post about the foot. This post was to relate the foot to knee pain.  As I was writing I felt I was composing words that were very similar to what I had already written.  To check, I reread “Stomping out Foot Pain with Pilates” and with a little curiosity, I looked at the stats for that post.  And then I was floored.  That post has been seen twice as much as any of the other posts in The Pilates Studio’s blog. I could toot my own horn and say that the writing was brilliant so of course my post was seen so many more times, but I think realistically the trend here is that people are googling.  And people are googling about the foot and foot pain.  People are looking for different ideas about the foot.  People are starting to understand the importance of the foot and its relationship to knee, hip, and back pain.  The feet are being seen as more important in overall health.  So am I obsessed?  Well, not anymore than the rest of the google population…

I took this obsession to the University of Hartford’s Hartt School.  It’s the first week of classes and as faculty we observe the placement ballet classes to make sure that the students are placed in classes suited to their technical development.  Well as I was watching the students, once again I was observing how they use their feet.  Are they using their feet efficiently? Are they applying the foot articulation exercises built into the ballet barre to the work in the center?  And if I noticed that a student wasn’t articulating the foot efficiently, I asked myself what I knew about that particular student’s injury history, and well I must admit I was starting to see some correlations of the movement of the foot to ankle and knee injuries.  Was I ticking the data in any way that I could present scientifically as if there is a correlation coefficient of +.98 between movement of the foot and ankle and knee pain?  Well no not at all, but lets just say these observations didn’t dampen my foot obsession in the least.    

So will this be my last post about the movement of the feet?  I think it’s fair to say no.  Most likely at some point in the future I will feel compelled to write about the feet again and probably then again.  The good sign is the google stats are on my side we are a world obsessed with the feet.  They are our connection to the earth, they give us the spring in our step, and when they hurt they hurt a lot.  Ahh yes, back to my client’s foot and her knee pain, I simply taught her this “Recipe For an Agile Foot.” And it relieved her knee pain.  Will it relieve everyone’s knee pain?  I don’t think so, but I am confident that it should be a part of the puzzle for anyone out there!

Katrina Hawley C.M.A, R.S.M.E

Co-Director of The Pilates Studio