Foot Tutorial

Hi, I'm Kathy Murakami and I'm sharing some more tips for alleviating a discomfort when you fly on a long haul airplane rides. Well sometimes as you know, your feet and legs tend to get swollen a little bit on a plane. And uh, this tutorial is going to share with you some ideas well about, uh, not only really alleviating swelling, but also working on, um, some common foot misalignments, which you may or may not be aware of that you have. So a foot that tends to have a really high arch, which is not my foot. They tend to have the foot shape something like this.

So the ankle looks a little bit more con k, or excuse me, convex on the outside and concave on the inside, you'll see a very high arch on the inside of the foot and sometimes even on the outside of the foot. All right. And if you have the opposite issue, you'll have more what's called protonation. It's a little more of a collapse through the inside of the arch. Sometimes the bone sticks out, the foot looks very flat, and then you have convexity on the inside. And concavity on the outside. So you may want to check your own feed out and take a look.

If you happen to have a little ball, you can put this ball actually here below the knee like so. If you don't have a ball, you can roll up a towel. Again, if guests, if you're on a plane, I've even done this with my shoe, you just need something between your shinbones to get the what we call walk down the shinbone. That means we don't want the shinbone to move and then we sit so that the knees are at 90 degrees. And if you can see in the camera, the ankle bone is straight down. You'll feel a little bony protrusion here. This is the head of the fibula s straight down, up and down.

So you don't want your foot forward or your foot back. That's the main point. If you have a foot that tends to be in this position, you need more flexing at your ankle. So you do something like this. These are called toe taps and that's all you do. And what'll happen is in about 10 or 20 seconds, your shins are going to be burning and you want to build the number of times you tap like this until you are doing this for a total of three minutes.

Oh my. You notice that I'm kind of slapping the floor and my toes come all the way down because what I see sometimes is this like this because there's not a lot of movement in the ankle joint for this type of foot. Now if you have the opposing issue, which is the pro nation, your feet need a little bit more arch. So we do something here called heel tap. So it's the opposite direction and you see I'm landing, landing, landing, landing, landing.

And if you've ever been on an airplane, they have those little cards in the seatbelt pockets that tell you to do something like this. So why not work on your particular alignment issue if you happen to have one like this? Okay, next move is called angel sweeps. So we're going to go back to that first foot position I talked about, which was the super nation, the higher arched person. That type of alignment needs more strength here in the outside of the ankle. So we'll pretend we have a little pile of sand we gathered from the beach outside this studio. Lift the foot.

So you're doing that flex gathering the sand in here and flicking it out. Something like this. So these are called again angel sweeps out as though you're lifting your pinky toe up to the outside of your knees. Make sure you're breathing with this and you can see if you don't have something here, the tendency is going to be to move your whole leg around. So if you have something to keep that Shin area still, there'll be to your benefit.

So you can guess that if you're a pro nater you need the arch work, you would lift, open the foot up and pull. Yeah, and in, so now the sand you're gathering is here and you're trying to pile it up here. And I happened to also like to spread my toes open as I do this. So that's what you're doing here. Great. The last piece I have, because I have a diner band now, you may or may not fly with a dyna band. Maybe it'd be a good idea. If you did, you could kind of do some little stretches for your upper body. I'll share some of those tips the next time, but you take the dine of band, you can stick it under the, obviously under the seat underneath the front of you.

The four foot goes underneath the band. You want to lock down that Shin and you pull like this so you slip, flex, spread the toes and pull. So the Dinah band, what the diner band does is I gathering it here is it's a little bit sticky, so it helps. It's easy for your skin to grab it. Yeah, and it helps. If I made this flat, there we go. And then you have a little bit of visual feedback that you're actually pulling something. Yeah, you don't have to have a diner band. You could do this just like this too, but somehow it's very satisfying because you could actually see something moving for your efforts. Can you use a towel? What have you like?

So the idea is that you're really creating this, uh, oh drawing action through the intrinsics of the soul of the foot. Oh, come on. There we go. And if you're super ambitious and you want to do these at home, you can place a towel underneath your foot and do the same thing. And if you become very skilled with a towel, you have a very long towel and you can put a little one or two pound weight at the other end of that towel and have even more resistance. So good luck with your toes.