00:53
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
After like five hours of work. Just understand that a hot day touching feet. We love feet here at Pro To Col  support systems. Why not? Because we’ve got foot fetish. Not because we’re like that, but because feet are so important and they’re there. They’re forgotten about a lot because we don’t, we just take for granted feet and how they actually help us to move. 

01:19
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
So we’re connected to the earth. We’re connected to the ground by these suckers. And that’s our first point of contact. 

Our Feet are More Complex Than We Thought!

01:25
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
100%. Yeah, unless you’re walking on your hands and then it’s your hands. So feet let’s talk them about them. Feed have 26 bones in each foot, 26 bones. Let me just back that one up, we have 206 bones in our entire body and the feet take up over 50 bones. Yeah. Like that’s a lot of bones, 52 bones just make up the bottoms of our bodies, the other one’s hands, and feet. Lots of bones in there. What does that mean for us in these? We gotta take care of our feedback. We’re going to break down the feet today, not just the muscles, but the bones and why it’s so important for foot care, self care, and why we actually got to start working and touching our feet more. It’s not just about having pretty toenails, but it’s also about how do these feet actually move. 

Feet Start to Have Problems as we Age

02:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Because a lot of people, especially when you get older, you start having a lot of different breakdowns in your feet, and those are going to lead to like your bananas and your plantar fasciitis and your heels furs and your bone spurs and your hammertoes. Y’all we could go on for hours. 

02:42
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
We’re all spread out right in there. That just starts to try to lay on just like a pebble in there. Yeah. 

Foot Basics: Anatomy of the Foot

02:46
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. So let’s talk for you. Let’s talk first of all, 26 bones in each of these. So your feet actually breaks down. This is looks a little different than my big ass clod hopper, but these actually do a ton of work for us. The bones are broken down or the foot is broken down into three parts. You got your forefoot, which is more your phalanges, your toes. You’ve got your mid foot, which is your tarsals, which makes that little arch that we have that most of us have. You got your hind foot, which brings up the backside of you with your heel. The reason why it’s so important for us to not just focus on toes and or heel, but also these big guys is if you notice these bones that we have in here all do a ton of really intrinsic movement, which means they don’t do a lot of big motion. 

How to Move Your Feet Properly 

03:46
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We tend to think of feet as just basically being able to put it down. It can come back up. If you notice, every time we take a step down in our forefoot, the four foot actually drops. The mid foot drops down as a spring to handle the impact of our actual body. The hind foot actually drives back up to help with movement and gait and everything. 

04:13
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s a lot of articulation. A lot of movement happens even though small movement. A lot of that has happened for us to have a property, 

04:18
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? The bonds that in and of itself that make it up besides these big toes and the tarsals and the mandatory, these tarsals are really important. I’ll back it up and say, do you know that you have almost 200,000 nerve receptors in each foot? A lot of feeling, the only area of the body that has more nerves are your hands. And why do you think that is?

Because we need proprioception, right? Our foot hits the ground. When we hit the ground, we do a lot of little tiny intrinsic movement, but we’re also grabbing at the ground feeling what the ground feels like in order to push us back off. Think about this. When the lights go out and we’re in the dark. The first thing that the majority of us do is stick our hands out. Because proprioceptively we’re feeling with our hands. The feet are the same way. 

Flexibility Matters When it comes to Feet

05:20
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
These are so important. We need to be able touch the ground. We need to be able touch the grass. We need to be able to feel the sand. We need to be able to pick things up. I think people either be a bad fashion choices. I was one of those in other years of my life. When I worked, when I were way too high, a heel and a swish, my foot up really way too hard as we shush, or they don’t actually put their bare feet on the ground up to 200, since we receptors and nerve receptors in each soul of each foot. You guys, so let’s break this down. The forefoot. 

Why is this so important? You’ve got these little, tiny little digits on the base of your toes. We’ll put yourself back up there. These big feet that look like this, I’m going to stretch. 

How to Stretch Your Feet

06:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I’m going to stretch you. I’m going to stretch my, so where you see the ball of the foot, he’s totally ticklish. I’m going to do this for a second. Watch him. You got these big toes. The big toe is called the great toe. You’ve got these other four toes that are your digital arm. That actually is very helpful for picking up without this big toe. We do not actually camp. We can’t walk. So we need these toes to move. We need them to flex. We need them to extend. 

We need also need these joints to glide in and around our officials. I know, right? We’ve got this giant soul with these deep muscles that are in here. Actually the muscles of the feet actually come from the back of the top of the tibia and the fibula. So they come from the lower leg. We’ve got these big muscles and these are actually just tendons that are attached down into the toes. 

07:16
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
You’ve got these big tendons that come from the back of the foot and from the top of the foot, so that it’s not just about foot care, it’s about lower leg care. We need to make sure that you’ve got all of these muscles, your tibial air to be Elsa, anterior, your peroneal muscles, your fibrillary longest. Brevis you’re, you’re at your holochess longest. Your house is longest. You’re a little entity digitorum brevis. You’ve got totally all these different areas of the foot. 

You want to make sure that these are all taken care of because these are deriving these, and without these, you don’t have the range of motion. Let’s break down the anatomy . I know we really all the way home. Yeah. Remember what it is. All right. So these feet super flexible. We should have flexibility in these feet, in both the joints, the muscles, to be able to what stand, to be able to jump, to be able to walk. 

08:26
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
We need these bones working and we need these feet working good. Like I said, there’s up to 200 century nerves in each sole of each foot. The other thing is, if you notice the majority of our feet have come with this really cool arch, this is like these spring load that takes all of the impact. That then just sends it back up into the sky. If we’re jumping, it takes the impact. If we’re, if we’re exploding, it takes the impact. There’s actually a bunch of different, really intrinsic muscles that work in here to actually create this tiny little undulation of movement. 

Therefore we have also this forefoot or the midfoot right here, and the midfoot right here has all these tiny little bones in it that are actually exceedingly important. You’ve got your vicular bone, you’ve got your cuboid. You’ve got these three cuneiform bones and they do, they’re very, they’re called short bones and they have very small amounts of movement. 

What type of Joint does my foot have?

09:25
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
They glide their joint is a gliding joint. What happens is if we put too much pressure or too much impact, or wear really cruddy shoes, or we, we go fashion over function all the time. We can actually take these bones and drop them down into the bottom of the foot and they will actually move and drop with all of the pressure that’s applied to the foot. If you’re ever walking around and you feel like you’re walking on a pebble, or you’re walking on a rock on the inside of your foot, it’s these guys that have moved, 

10:00
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s kind of like that. I think it’s the whole slot taking the shape of the man placed on it. Correct. This is when you keep wearing shoes that are inappropriate, not fitting properly, or just design it not well, you had to push and to start taking on that shape. Yeah. 

10:14
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right on. Exactly. It’s exactly what it is. The beautiful thing about this is the navicular and the cuboid tend to move. What’ll happen is as they drop down, then your whole entire arch will tend to collapse and drop in this way. That puts more pressure on the inside of the foot, which then all of a sudden, now you’ve got potentially Funyuns. Now you’ve got potentially bone spurs. Now you’ve got a potential plantar fasciitis issue. Yeah. Plantar fasciitis is just irritation and inflammation of the plantar fascia. So it’s just irritation back there because. 

10:56
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Feeling every bit of. 

Muscle of the Foot: What do I do if they get stiff?

10:57
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It, because if the muscles aren’t moving, they’re getting stuck. All of a sudden, all the nerve endings come to the top like this and get really irritated. And then that’s what we start feeling. So you’ve got your shinbone. You got your fibula. This makes the lower part of your life. The beautiful thing is we don’t just need the foot to work, but we also need them, the bones and the bones up the ankle, the tailless and the tibia and the fibula to work as well. 

Everything gets to work and this big old heel of ours. The coolest thing about it is the tibia sits down in here and actually goes right into the tailless and the tailless drops. It is actually where your ankle joint is. Now when you’re moving and you go into dorsiflexion or plantar flection or Doris inflection, and you’re moving your ankle, the tailless it’s actually sliding and gliding underneath. 

11:58
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. If you think about this as like a coin slot, as you raise your, as you raise your foot and go into dorsiflexion, the coin slot actually drops back. When you go into plant or flection, this tail is bone will actually move forward. So the coin slot moves forward. So it’s back and it moves forward. If you are not standing correctly, if you are not moving correctly, or if you had a sprained ankle, a broken ankle, you’ve torn your calf, you have some kind of an injury. 

Now all of a sudden you’ve got secondary guarding and you’re walking like Frankenstein one foot where you’re just flat. You’re creating an invulnerability in a joint fixation right into there. Now the whole lower part of your leg isn’t going to work. And then this ankle isn’t gonna work. It’s going to put more pressure down into these bones and they’re going to drop down. 

Pain in the Bottom of the Feet

12:56
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Now you’re going to have a bunch of problems on the bottom of the foot. 

12:59
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You can have somebody just got, come and stretch you out. And I was like, 

13:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah, because the here’s the cool thing too. This is our Cal kamias right. This is the big heel that everybody knows everybody’s has a heel. Did you guys know that your heels actually supposed to move separately from your forefoot? If this isn’t moving, this is going to be moving way too much. There’s a balance that goes on between the front of your feet and the back of your heel. The heel gets to shift because if we know the big fibula, the little fibula, I guess you’d call it good job, Mike, we have big feet too. 

This fibula is actually thus the side of our ankle bone that becomes the outside part of our ankle bone. If you see this, see if you can see the outside of the fibula, it actually creates the lateral. Now we always, and so if the ankle is it working this bone, which actually moves up and down like this, as we move stops moving, and then boom. 

14:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Now you’ve got a knee issue. See, who knew they’re so important? 

14:11
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It could just show up as knee pain, but it’s coming from that. 

How the Feet Are Supposed to Move: Abduction

14:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So here’s the other thing too. Your feet should be able to abduct. They should be able to move apart from one another AB duct and add up. They should be able to extend and flex. If you can’t actually move your feet out, you should be able to bring your big toe up and back into extension and then bend it just like you’re doing with your big finger. If you can’t move your big toe, you are not going to be able to walk properly because without the big toe, we don’t walk properly, like I said. 

What that does then is it puts way more pressure on all of these bones in here to do the work. Now, remember bones don’t move themselves, right? So we’ve got muscles again. Like I said, that sit all the way up here and come from here. Their tendon actually drops down, attaches underneath the foot is in our peroneal muscles and they’ll attach here. 

15:20
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The other one will attach here and they’re actually helping to Evert the foot. We’re having muscles that are attaching way back here, the plant terrorists and the, to be able to post here and the gas rock and the soleus, and actually helping to plant our flex the foot or the ankle. 

When you’ve got the muscles in the front that are helping to dorsiflex the ankle. If we don’t have the movement in these tendons and in this leg, because we’re not working at well enough, we’re not going to have the muscles in the foot actually do being able to do anything. If you’ve ever tried to walk with a flat foot, that it’s virtually impossible, Right? So, so the reason, one of the reasons why I, I really liked working the foot so much is because I also know that these tiny little movements in here will make gigantic changes all the way up your kinetic chain. 

Plantar Fasciitis What is it and what do I do?

16:19
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Let’s talk about a couple of foot conditions. Let’s talk about the plantar fasciitis, which everybody’s seeing every path. What it is it’s inflammation of the plantar fascia, the ligament. As the plantar fasciitis and stick your foot up there. You’re walking around and you’ve either got really ill fitting shoes, you walk too much, you stand too much, your shoes aren’t comforted, or you don’t have a good enough arch support. 

What will happen is you’ll put pressure into the foot and then you’ll have irritation. It goes right into that ligament, which is right about there. It’ll feel like you’re stepping on a rock. This can create severe pain and swelling, severe pain is warming. 

17:08
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
They can’t translate hallway. Pastor, feel all that into your account. 

17:11
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. What’ll happen is if you don’t take care of this, it can cause the cartilage around the heel to like wear and tear. And I actually, yeah. So, because it’s pulling on it because of all of the inflammation, it’ll start to create a lot of problems in the heel back here like that. I know you did. I know you did. You’ve got bone spurs all around the heel and now you can’t put that foot on or your shoe on, and now you still have pain in the back of that foot. 

Bunions in the feet

Bunions are another one that I’d really like to talk about. My hands are that big bony, prominence that sit on the outside of your big toe. What actually happens is from it’s either passed down hereditarily or it’s from wearing shoes that are squishing you like this, or squishing like this, or just not fitting well. 

What Shoes Should I be Wearing For my Feet: A Wide Toe Box

18:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
What’ll happen is it’ll put so much pressure into the toe box, which is the front of your toes. Now, remember you need these guys to move back and forth out and in up and down, you need these guys to glide in order to have proper gait and actually good movement. 

Now you’ve got a shoe that’s either too high heels ladies on some gentlemen, and it’s putting way too much pressure into the ball of the foot, or you have way too much pressure going on to the inside right here, where it’s too narrow, and then you’ll drop your arch. 

What you’re doing is you’re also putting a lot of pressure right into the joint of the big toe. What’ll happen is the big toe will start to move over. If, like we said, the PCO electric effect that will slow when you’re doing a lot of push and pull and stress into the area, what it’s going to do is it’s going to start to actually build more bone in this area. 

19:06
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
What you’re getting is a buildup of new, like remodeled bone, so to speak, refer in layman’s terms. And then that gets really irritated. You don’t have any way to really support this big joint. It’s a good way for us to, by moving the feet around and taking care of our feet, we’re actually taking care of the fact that we could be putting up potential Bunions because Bunions of most of the time. 

Achilles tendon Issues in the Foot

And I don’t speak for everyone. A lot of times with when people have been in surgery, it doesn’t actually do the job because they haven’t fixed the outstanding problem, which is up the kinetic chain because they’re fixing the booboo, right? You got to go after the bug, not the bug, that bit, you not scratch the itch. We have that from the dropped arch. We have a potential for having Achilles tendon injury as well. 

20:04
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
So you drop your arch, the Achilles. I’m not going to do that to you, but keep your foot there. Your Achilles is where your gas rock and your soils, your calf muscles come down and they create that long backside of your heel, right? It comes underneath and it attaches down into the bottom of your heel. 

The Achilles tendon is the tendon that allows you to actually go into plantar flexion, to go up on your toes. Basketball players jump all the time. You’ll see when with these high calves, runners, cyclists, they have these giant calves and they have this tight Achilles tendon. If you remember the Greek in Greek mythology, his mom wanted to make him in. You want to make a Memorial buddy, want to make him pervious to die. He dipped him into the river sticks, which made him not vulnerable to anything all the way down, except for his Achilles heel. 

The Importance of Supporting Your Ankle 

21:02
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
When he was fighting, someone shot him into the Achilles and there goes their Yoast. Kelly’s poor guy, but he gave us a cool name. The Achilles heel what’ll happen is the arch will drop because we’re not taking care of our feet. We’re not using the muscle structure in order to create the arch drops. We get this Achilles tendonitis from here because we cannot support our own weight into the ankle joint as it is, and into the bones of the foot and the forklift and the midpoint. Right? Now you’ve got all this irritation that’s going on back here. People think it’s just coming from the cap, but they’re not dealing with the foot. 

21:46
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
What we find that most people are having any kind of neck problems. You go down to the foot is that major culprit or contributing factor to the problem. 

21:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
It’s so true. Yes, you do need this today. Johnson’s every day you need this, or at least every Wednesday at 1230. So listen, how can we fix it? We don’t have an arch. Can we make an arch. 

22:10
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Actually start to build? 

22:12
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Yeah. Do we need orthotics every single time to get an arch. 

22:16
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Know you have to help immediately get you out of some pain, 

22:20
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
But it’s. 

22:20
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Just, it’s just a short, I’d say it’s a temporary, 

Which Shoes are Best to Prevent Foot Issues?

22:23
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right? What happens if these bones now drop and drop down and you start to drop into that big toe or drop into the foot candies, get these, get moving back. A lot of times you guys what’ll happen is after you’re doing this and you’re not paying attention to your feet, you sure as heck not paying attention to your shoes. 

Don’t get me started on the shoe conversation because I will tell you if you really want to hear about it, I’ll tell you in an off time, but I’m not going to tell you all the tissue time, but I have a lot of opinions on shoes. You don’t have a good arch support. You don’t have something that’s giving you stability in the inside of your foot and keeping you stable where you’re not too pronated, you’re not too super needed. And if either is inverted. 

Is Being Flat Footed A Real Thing?

23:10
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
And so I know, right? What’s happening is the arch starts to drop the bones, then follow the muscle structure because the muscle structure isn’t strong enough to keep it up and or the bones drop. The muscle structure can’t keep it up. It’s a chicken egg, but what’ll happen is then you’ll get, what’s called a flat foot. Some people are born with a flat foot.

Exercises to Support Your Feet

23:37
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right. What will happen is if we keep this flat, this has no spring load anymore. This’ll right up into the ankle, right up into the knee, right? It’s been to the back, up to the hip. Pretty soon it will be right there. I mean, I tell you it’s true flat brain flat head. That’s where that term came from. So how do we create an arch? If you guys have your foot, you can do this at home. 

What you’re going to do is an arch is not created by flexing the toes that actually pulls everything down. That’s not what we want to do. The arch is actually from the ball of your foot. You want to take the ball of your foot and you want to try to pull it towards your heel. You’re going to try and drop it down without flexing your toes. That’s still, 

24:25
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
It’s a lot with your foot flat on the ground. And really it’s, 

24:29
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
I’m making it challenging for you. What you want to do is you want to, first of all, you want to extend your toes and you want to abduct for them. You want to think about taking the ball of your foot. 

24:41
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
Let’s go to mind, 

24:43
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Take the ball of your foot. You’re dropping the ball of your foot towards your heel. When you drop the ball of your foot towards your heel, like here, what you’re doing is you’re making these bones go up. The muscles that are attached to the bones in here will then start pulling and it’ll create that arch. What you can do is you could actually manually take care of your feet and create your own. 

25:09
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
You can also start to work the phones up this way, trying to get your phone, push them back up. 

25:15
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Show why don’t you do a quick demonstration of if you were to work on your own foot, what it looks like? 

25:21
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I would just put it up on my lap up here, which is why I use your mouth or up here. It’s really, we’re trying to just draw that arch back up, just rotating it back up this way. I’m being judged. What’s up. I’m not trying to crank everything and crack everything. I’m just trying to bring it back up and around. 

25:40
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Right now. Do you want them to move as a unit or would you move them independently? 

25:45
Mike Julian LMT, CAMTC
I would try to move it independently by two to start with, and then start from the rest of the unit. It’s, I like to get my thumb in there and now I use my other hand to press on the thumb. They’d get a more isolated movement. Right? 

25:58
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
The other thing that you guys can do too, is think about being your own toe spacer. This is like, if anybody has a foot thing, I’m sorry, you guys would probably super Bruno scout right now. You’re going to put your fingers into between your own toes. You’re going to squeeze down into your fingers and then let go. I’m going to extend my fingers out and spread your toes. ‘

You’re going to squeeze your toes into my fingers and then let go. I’m going to squeeze your toes and extend and abductor toes. You’re going to take it and you’re going to take them and move them back and forth so that you could actually open the foot up. It’s really about opening the foot as much as you possibly can, because you want to get these bones moving. Because if the bones aren’t moving, you’re going to have a lot of problems in here. 

26:55
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
Think about it the next time you have any issue, not just in your foot, in your lower leg, in your knee, in your hip. If your feet aren’t moving that well, and you can’t plant our flex dorsiflex. What I mean by dorsiflex is you should be able to pull your foot back towards your knee without bringing your whole entire body up off the floor. 

You should be able to walk on your heels with your toes, pulled up. The other thing too is you should be able to go into inversion and eversion, which means I’ll do it on a wide body. You should be able to move your foot in and move your foot out. Not just from the forefoot, but from the mid foot. You should be able to swing your ankle in and out. If you are having a hard time doing either of those moves, check your feeds. 

27:49
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
If you’re having pain up here, check your feet, you can do a lot with the feet and the feet. When they’re feeling better, the whole body feels better. Give your feet a break. Stop wearing those crazy old shoes that are all fashion and no function. That doesn’t mean orthopedic old lady shoes. That means take your feet first because you only have one pair. The last I checked are not doing full foot replacements. So you only have them. 

When you lose them that you’re going to walk from key and we don’t want funky walkers. All right, you guys, I hope that was really helpful for you. I hope Mike enjoyed his free foot massage for the last like 20 minutes, because he’s not going to get that anytime soon. Just to let you know, that was on me. It’s, it’s a one and done folks. I hope you guys enjoyed it. 

28:43
Julie Pitois LMT, CAMTC
If you guys know anybody who really needs some foot happiness and has some problems in their feet, they have pain in the bottom of the foot. They have a pain in the bottom of their heel. Their feet just don’t feel right, or their legs hurt or their ankles show him this video because they need to see this, share it with your friends, share it with your family.