Jeff Cavaliere

My mom had pretty flat feet.

And then I also think that it was years of doing things professionally.

without addressing that.

So as I started to lift weights and applying a lot of external force and load onto those feet that were not able to support that, it just got worse and worse.

They definitely, they didn't always, they weren't always as bad as they got to.

But I wish I had done more for it at an early age because even now,

if I were to go back and try to train the intrinsic foot muscles more, it's just not going to reverse the damage that I've done in the knee to this point.

So I'm less motivated to try to do it because I've also figured out how to manage with the flat feet now to...

decrease the impacts of it.

So I'm not so motivated to go jump in now and spend extra time on something that may not have a huge impact for me.

But for someone who's just starting to deal with flat feet and the weakness in their feet, I would definitely jump in and do something.

And the easiest test is simply to put a towel on the floor.

put your foot on a bare foot, try to scrunch up the towel with your feet.

And if you start to rapidly cramp up in those foot muscles of yours, again, it goes back to what we talked about before in the low back.

The cramps are coming from a lack of strength.

They're trying to provide support in an area that doesn't have it.

So if you don't have intrinsic support or arch strength, then you're trying to ask the foot to do too much of what it can.

Even a simple scrunching or activation of those muscles to scrunch the towel together is too much for you to handle, kind of like the weak neck on a crunch.

you have very weak feet and you would benefit from doing a lot of those activities that help to do that some people recommend running in sand some people recommend using these towel drills just even just balancing barefoot and doing single leg balance drills barefoot are going to not just cause ankle strength improvements but intrinsic foot strength improvements

they're all good things to do because you can improve their muscles.