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| Dear All,
Hi, I'm new to the forum and am overhwhelmed by the knowledge and experience that you guys have been sharing. it's great and am just happily reading all your inputs. However, I do have a longstanding question- and ordeal I share with my teacher. Flat feet really gets in the way- and even demands extra effort in getting into the perfect Tadasana. I particularly find balancing poses difficult as standing on one foot is a nightmare. Some say i should find the four corners of my feet (easy for flat, almost-rectangle feet) and stand on that. Others say i should try and overpronate, forcing the creation of an arch - but that makes me even more wobbly. Any tips? Thanks. |
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Location: London, England | Hi Caffeine14,
I always use a technique i borrowed from the Feldenkrais method to improve my posture and that of my students. The technique is called the short foot, or the small foot. Sit on a chair with a towel under your foot. Now pull all the toes back towards your heel, simultaneously. The movement should be almost imperceptible to the eye, but you will feel like you are pulling the towel backwards. Now try leaning onto the outside edge of your foot-you will find that the little toe works more strongly than the toes on the inside of the foot. In this way you will be able to use the whole foot in standing postures to bring better balance and alignment to the whole body-rather than the foot being merely a platform, it becomes an active part of your posture.
You will have better motivation to use the small foot if you practice using it to pull your body into alignment-try standing with your weight mainly on one foot and let your pelvis slouch to ne side-perform the small foot and fell how it can pull your body into an alignment which is above the foot-i.e in alignment.
Hope this helps-should help to strengthen the muscles on the sole of the foot and the calf which help to maintain the foot's structure. When people have told you to raise the arch on the inside of the foot, they have been ignorant of the fact that the foot possesses two more arches, and simply lifrting up the medial arch will probably negatively affect the other arches-best do small foot instead, which should positively influence the whole foot structure, or at least stop it getting any worse.
Take care
Nick |
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| Thanks Nick! I think I can even pull this exercise off under my desk in the office. It does sound helpful, I will try it soon. It sounds like a very practical exercise which I can complement another that I do- to have my feet slowly evolve to ahve mini arches: sitting down on a chair, rolling out a small towel in front of me and using my toes to pick the towel up and drop it down. Doing this for at least 1/2 hour a day seems to strengthen my toes. I have less toe cramps than I used to. Cheers! |
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| i teach my flat footed students and collapsed arched students to use an arch in their movements because it creates proper alignment throughout the ankles and legs (and then throughout the body).
i like the exercises that nick mentions, and there's also an article on YogaJournal.com written by Tias LIttle in regards to flat feet. It's a great article that gives a good deal of information.
Also, for simple strengthening of the arch, i recommend buying a pair of solid, wooden-bottomed clogs by the Bastad company. These are orthopedicly correct. Walk in them for 20 minutes (without stopping, like you would walk in athletic shoes), and then remove them and do the exercises from Tias Little's article and those that Nick outlines. THis will strengthen the muscles of the foot and help you maintain an arch not only during yoga, but any other time that you may want/need one. |
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| I don't think there is any problem of flat feet in Ashtanga practise. My left foot is quite flat. But I can still do everything perfectly. |
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| you can do all of the ashtanga poses perfectly?
will you be my teacher?
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| Hi, this is my first post...
I have flat feet too, and used to have problems with burning / cramping sensations in the soles of my feet. Generally, the pain seemed to occur after the standing poses (Warrior 1 & 2, and Trikonasana), and also during and after Prasarita Padottanasana. I suspected that these problems resulted from imbalances on the weight and tension I was placing on my feet, because the problems were always exacerbated when my alignment was off.
I did a little research to see if I could solve the problem. For the standing poses (Warrior 1 & 2, and Trikonasana) I read that you should try to bring your awareness to and emphasize the weight on the big toe mound of the front foot, and bring your awareness to and emphasize the weight the outside edge of the rear foot. After practicing this on the standing poses, I have to say that I noticed a real improvement.
For Prasarita Padottanasana, I read that you should emphasize the weight on the big toe mound of both feet, and to be careful not to tighten and cramp the outside edges of the feet. Rather than forming a tight crescent with the outside edges of the feet, you should try to splay out the little toe and fan out and widen the outside edges of the feet. I tried this and it worked. Also, in Prasarita Padottanasana, I read that the heels shouldn't be closer together than the big toes. I then developed a variation where while approaching the pose, I put most of the weight on the big toe mounds while slightly lifting the heels and allowing the heels to spread apart slightly. Once I'm fully in the pose, I re-ground the heels. Combined with keeping the outside of the feet stretched and open, this seems to eliminate a lot of the foot cramping that I used to experience.
I hope that one or more of these suggestions might work for you as well. Good luck!
Edited by De Rigueur 2006-01-19 2:15 AM
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Location: London, England | Hi all,
From my own personal experience in yoga classes I know that students are given instructions on how to alter the structure of their feet which may initially seem helpful in gaining a better understanding of a yoga position, but can in fact actually undermine that student's attempts to optimize their health and their ability to advance into a better expression of their yoga postures. As an example, students are sometimes told to put their back foot up against the walll in standing postures. The (intended) effect of this is to stop the foot slipping so that the student can push harder and 'regain' some of that effort in pushing the rest of their body further into the posture. I realize there may be other intentions. The trouble is, doing this will tend to encourage a flat foot to occur, even in people who already have flat feet (pes planus). The foot is modified like the crumple zone on a car-its structure is compressed, resulting in fallen arches. Not only this, but other joints in the body are also compressed, although to a lesser extent, usually.
If, instead, a student attempts to perform the small foot action described earlier, they can enhance their foot's structure and function, and also create a situation where there is less compression, or an appropiate amount of compression, in the other joints of the body. One of the effects of a well-performed bandha is to initiate the small foot-the compression in the lower spine can remind us to pull the extremities towards our body's centre. In this way it is possible to perform our practice in such a way that body's joints are held in tension-the surfaces of the joints may still touch, but more lightly than a style of movement which involves pushing.
Downward dog is another posture which can be seen to benefit from this style of movement-there have been posts on this website which mention slipping hands and how to avoid them. The hand has characteristics which it shares with the foot-it is easy to appreciate that the human hand is one that is designed to grip-to become 'small', if you like. If we were taught to appreciate this, then wrist injuries would be far less common-the muscles that support the arches of the hand would support the structure of the wrist-taking the analogy of the crumple zone again, you would have a wrist which is prepared for impact or for the forces that are associated with upward dog, downward dog, handstands etc. Also no more slipping hands, as the hands are pulled towards the shoulders-or put it anothere way, as we pull on the hands in downward dog, the muscles of the arm are brought into alignment with the muscles of pectoalis major which are then aligned with the abdominal muscles-as the abdominal muscles are tightened with the use of bandha, then it is easy to see how the bandha can create a pull on the hands. In this way we can create a contraction using our abdominal muscles which is specific to each asana, giving us a greater motivation to use bandha as a tool of both the body and mental concentration.
Think I need to get some tablets to stop me getting over-excited, sorry if i got off the original topic, but i thought this may help to explain why the small foot is so crucial in Yoga-maybe if we wore shoes in our practice it would lose some its value.
Take care
Nick |
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| Thanks Nick I will try this technique when I get the chance! |
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Expert Yogi
Posts: 8442
 
| Nick - I thinnk you are right about the instructions to beginner students. As we progress however, the instructions become more explicit and those which lead to the result of the "small foot" are included. I love the name! I just can't imagine telling all of that to a beginner student who still doesn't know where her kneecaps are. Iyengar teachers are already known for their pickiness and attention to details. Going to this depth for every body part would have everyone but the engineers running for the hills  I find that students who over use the outer edge of the foot (as at the wall or in prasarita padottanasana) simply need to be told to put some weight on the big toe mound and the inner heel at the back edge of the arch. That seems to be enough to work on at that stage. |
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| I have flat feet like a platipus  but it never interfered with my asanas balancing or any others. So may be your problem is not in your feet? ;) |
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Flat Feet
