The answer, like so many answers in healthcare, is “It depends.”

In this 3-part series, I’ll help you to determine the optimal features of shoes for your particular foot. Part 1 will look at how your foot is constructed and what’s needed from your foot when walking. Part 2 will talk about what shoes help a person with flat feet. And Part 3 will look at what shoes can help a person with high arches in their feet. 

Let’s get started with Part 1…

The foot is an absolute marvel of construction. With each step, the foot must adapt to the unique attributes of the surface and withstand large amounts of force. When your foot hits the ground, the ground hits back. We’ve all heard the phrase “for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” In the case of walking, this ‘opposite reaction” is known as ground reaction force and your foot and often your entire body is affected by this force with every step. Several attributes of the anatomy and function of the foot are designed to absorb and adapt to these forces.  

When it comes to determining the best shoes in which to invest, I suggest temporarily setting aside considerations of style and belief and looking instead at how your foot needs to function for optimal comfort, whether it is able to function that way based on your unique anatomy, and how your shoes can help or hinder those functions. 

Let’s take a quick look at the walking cycle. During one walking or gait cycle, your foot lands on the ground and remains there as your body travels forward over your foot. Then your heel comes up and you push off to propel yourself onto your other foot. 

So what does your foot need to be able to do while you are walking? 

As your foot lands on the ground and your body travels forward over your foot, your foot needs to be flexible so it can absorb the ground reaction forces and protect your leg and back from these forces. It also needs to adapt to any unevenness on the surface. If the ground is slanted, the sidewalk raised or there’s a rock or twig, your mobile foot helps you keep your balance and take this in stride. As your foot prepares to propel you forward onto the other foot, it needs to become rigid. It’s more effective to push off something rigid than something flexible. So with each step you take, your foot needs to be flexible at times and rigid at times. 

Now look at your feet while you are standing…

Do you tend toward flat feet? Or do you have a high arched foot? Because of the interlocking bone structure in the foot, a flat foot is more mobile and flexible and a high arched foot is more rigid. 

If you tend toward flat feet, you are in good shape when the foot needs to be mobile as in the early part of the gait cycle. Your foot will absorb ground reaction forces and adapt to the uneven surfaces. However, toward the end of the cycle, when your foot needs to become rigid, your foot may still be too mobile and you may run into trouble. If you are having trouble with bunions, plantar fasciitis, or your knees, changing the type of shoes you wear may be helpful. 

If you tend toward high arched feet, you are in good shape when the foot needs to be rigid as in the later part of the gait cycle. You’ll be able to push off and propel yourself forward onto the other foot very well. However, when you need flexibility, like in the early part of the gait cycle, your foot may be too rigid to effectively absorb ground reaction forces and adapt to uneven surfaces. If you’re having trouble with spraining your ankles with back pain, a different type of shoe may help.

If everything is going great, that’s wonderful! You can file this information away for use at another time. 

Coming up in Part 2, we’ll talk about the shoe features that help a flatter foot. Thanks for reading!

Remember when you were a child and you fell down and skinned your knee? After your knee was cleaned up and the bandaid applied, the thing that helped the most was Mommy or Daddy kissing it and making it better. That tender, loving care, the TLC, felt like the magic potion that healed the pain. 

As we grow into adults and experience a skinned knee or worse, we often forget about the magic potion, the TLC. But it hasn’t lost its power. 

In my many years of practice as a Physical Therapist and Zero Balancing practitioner, I’ve worked with hundreds of people who are in pain. Some for a few months and some for several years. And I’ve observed, without exception, that when clients consciously choose self-care and pain management, a healing event has occurred. The trajectory of their healing path changes and moves upward towards well-being. This self-administered TLC has the same curative power as the kiss your knee received as a child. 

What’s the explanation for this phenomenon? This is my hypothesis: the TLC, the attention and care in response to pain, changes the energetics of the situation. Let me explain. As a Zero Balancing practitioner, I see people as consisting of both structure and energy. The structure is everything in the body that can be seen, like bones and muscles and blood. The energy is everything in the body that is unseen, like thoughts and memories and vitality. Structural issues are usually the focus of western medicine and energetic issues are usually the focus of eastern medicine. Zero Balancing bridges western and eastern medical thought by addressing the relationship between your structure and your energy, by seeing people as both structure and energy. From this perspective, when you skinned your knee as a child, your structure was injured. Your skin was abraded, you bled, your nerve endings signaled injury and pain to your brain. The kiss, the TLC, was an energetic exchange. The love conveyed by the kiss was as necessary to your healing process as cleaning and covering the wound. 

It’s been my observation that as adults, we often forget about the TLC, this energetic aspect of healing. Or we think to offer it to others but not to ourselves. Some introspection may reveal why the value of self-TLC has fallen through the cracks. I suspect the reasons are as individual as each of us. And if you’re in miserable pain, the “whys” are less important than the alleviation of your suffering. What’s important is adding the TLC component to the treatment approach.  

This is one reason I work closely with my clients to help them create a Pain Control toolbox.  The toolbox we are most familiar with is the one in the garage or utility closet. It may contain a hammer and a screwdriver and a variety of other tools. Often the garage toolbox gets filled as the needs arise. You want to hang a picture so you buy a hammer.

A Pain Control toolbox is analogous to the toolbox in your garage to some extent. When pain occurs, most of us have not bought the tools ahead of time. It’s human nature. Many of us do nothing, hoping the pain will just go away. That’s human nature too. 

And sometimes the pain does just go away. That’s great! If it doesn’t, we may search the Internet or ask a doctor or PT what the best medication would be, or whether heat or ice is better. We are looking for tools. From my perspective, even this act of seeking tools to help the pain is TLC. So you have already started the magic. 

Another aspect of the TLC is filling your Pain Control toolbox with tools you like. While simple, this is a powerful statement. Think about the last time you felt cared for by someone. It’s likely they said or did something you liked. If you put a heating pad on a sore back muscle, on a structural level, the heat may help the muscle to relax. If you really like heat and feel comfy and warm in a comfortable chair with the heating pad, it seems to work even better. That, along with the fact that you thought to use a heating pad, and gave yourself the time, is the TLC part. You helped both your structure and your energy. You helped all the parts of yourself. 

The next article will contain ideas and strategies for creating your own Pain Control toolbox. In the meantime, you don’t have to wait to get started. Look around your home and identify the tools you tend to use most often when you’re in pain. These are already in your toolbox. If this article has made you realize you don’t do much for yourself when in pain, you are not alone! And it’s never too late. Search the internet or ask a healthcare professional for some suggestions and try a few things out. Remember, the act of seeking pain remedies is self-TLC. When you find something you like, even if it helps just a little, you’ve started your toolbox. 

Have you ever had an experience that has upset you? Or felt anxious about an upcoming academic or medical test or procedure? Or felt stressed about a loved one’s health or the COVID-19 pandemic? If you’re like most of us, the answer is yes, yes, and yes. And you are not alone! 

Like you, I’ve experienced those feelings many, many times. After an upsetting experience, I might find myself feeling agitated for several hours. I may feel uneasy or worried for several days preceding a medical exam or procedure. And the stress of the pandemic has become a constant, always in the background and often front and center. 

Among the many stress management tools available, I have found the Pyramid and Parallel Breath meditations to be particularly helpful because they are both so effective and, once learned, are easy and don’t take a lot of time to do. 

I first experienced both meditations while taking a Zero Balancing (ZB) class. The ZB class started, and still starts, each day with creating a Pyramid and breathing Parallel Breaths. Sitting quietly and guided by the teacher, these meditations helped me feel more present, attentive and enlivened, which enhanced my class experience and made learning easier and lots of fun. I’ve often had helpful insights about myself or my Zero Balancing practice during these meditation sessions. Once I learned how to do these meditations, I realized I could use them on my own outside of class, individually or together, to help me in a number of different situations. 

For example, the Parallel Breath meditation helped me many years ago when I worked as a Home Care Physical Therapist. I had been assigned a new patient and was to begin his treatment in his home. About 5 minutes into the Physical Therapy evaluation process, I asked him if he had any pain. This was a standard question asked of all new patients. In response, he began to yell at me. He got up and walked through his house for about 15 minutes, screaming at me the whole time about his dissatisfaction with his prior medical care. While I knew his anger wasn’t personal and my heart went out to him for his frustration and pain, it was very upsetting to be on the receiving end of all that rage. I was still shaken when I returned to my car. My next patient appointment was in 15 minutes and I needed to compose myself. So I sat there in my car and breathed Parallel Breaths for about 3 minutes. It helped me to quiet and organize myself internally so I could drive safely and be professional, calm and caring with my next patient. 

The everyday usefulness of the Pyramid meditation was demonstrated many years ago when I taught a course on Complementary Medicine to graduate Physical Therapy and Nursing students at Simmons College in Boston, MA. Because the 3-hour lecture took place at 5pm on Wednesday evenings, the students in these arduous training programs usually arrived tired from a long day in the middle of a week of long days. I began each class with a Pyramid meditation. As we moved through the meditation, I could feel the environment in the room shift. Many students told me how much they looked forward to the meditation each week, how it calmed and focussed them, and especially helped them midweek. One of the students shared that when she spent her weekends at her parents’ small, family-filled, noisy city apartment, she created a pyramid over her desk to help her focus on her studies. And it worked! 

I also use the Pyramid meditation when I’m hoping an upcoming event will go smoothly or successfully. I create a pyramid over my experience prior to travelling, either the night before or the morning of. I invite in all those things I think would be helpful, such as a well-rested and alert airplane pilot, kind fellow passengers, a smooth experience going through security, arriving at my destination with all my luggage. Likewise, I create a pyramid over my Zero Balancing class the night before I teach as well as before the ZB classes I take. I’ve created pyramids for friends, family, students and clients, at their request, prior to surgeries, medical procedures, the GMATs, whatever they may feel anxious about. 

Would all these events go smoothly without a pyramid meditation? I don’t know. I do know that creating a pyramid in these instances helped me to feel better in the moment, conveyed my caring in a concrete way to others, and most often, the desired outcomes occurred. As my grandmother used to say…”It couldn’t hurt!” 
Are you curious to experience a pyramid and parallel breath meditation? Information about weekly live guided meditations as well as recordings of past meditations are here. Join us! 

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Feeling stressed? Zero Balancing can help!

For many of us, these are the most stressful times we have ever experienced. Whether it’s the changes in our daily lives caused by COVID-19, the fires and poor air quality here in the San Francisco Bay area, the state of our country, or the state of our world, we are being called upon to manage a veritable avalanche of stress. With this much stress, our autonomic nervous system, the nervous system that regulates our heart rate, blood pressure, and many other basic body functions, can get stuck in a high alert response. This high alert, AKA fight or flight, is our body’s way of responding to both a real or a perceived threat. Not only do we feel very uncomfortable under this much stress, it’s not good for us. The unhealthy consequences of stress are well documented and include lowering our immune system’s ability to fight infection. To state the obvious, when in a pandemic, a strong immune system is vitally important. And so is reducing stress. 

Zero Balancing can help. Research on Zero Balancing is revealing how a 30 minute session can decrease stress by 61%. Researchers at the NeuroSynchrony Institute in Austin, Texas used polygraph (lie detector) technology to measure stress levels in people who were receiving a ZB session. This first study on the effects of Zero Balancing showed a 61% reduction in stress in those receiving ZB compared to a 12% reduction in the control group; people who lay quietly for 30 minutes without receiving ZB. Read more about this research here:  

https://zbtouch.org/2017-nsi-research-results-and-overview/

While more research is needed, these results are impressive. The research is confirming what I see in my clients every day and what I’ve experienced myself after receiving a ZB. We feel better after the session than we did before. We feel more relaxed and more ready to face the world. For those who use Zero Balancing for pain relief, the relaxation may seem like a side effect, albeit a good one! In truth, Zero Balancing sessions can be used to great advantage purely for stress relief and relaxation.  

Self care to manage stress is more important now than ever. Are you yearning to feel more relaxed? Consider adding a biweekly or monthly Zero Balancing session to your self care regimen! 

When speaking with a client about their long-time pain or recent injury, I usually offer many different ideas to help them create a Pain Control Toolbox. Therapeutic use of thermal modalities like heat or cold is a common and readily available tool. One of the most common questions I am asked is which one will work better. If you search Google to ask this question, multiple websites will appear with information and guidance. While the decisions are sometimes straightforward, in my experience it can be helpful to consider several unique factors not addressed in many online articles. 

“I hate cold.”

Some people really don’t like cold. Some people really don’t like heat. I’ve observed a basic human trait over the years and this is true of myself as well…we usually don’t continue things we don’t like! When it comes to continuing one’s self care, this becomes very important. If your back hurts every time you garden, you may have been advised by your doctor or Physical Therapist to ice your back right after gardening. If you hate using ice, it’s not likely you’ll continue this potentially very helpful practice long term. However, using heat will help as well and if you like heat, you’ll be developing a routine that may spare you a lot of discomfort for many years. Using the modality you prefer, even if it’s not identified as the “best” choice, will be better than doing nothing at all.  

There are certainly a few exceptions. For an acute injury, like a sprained ankle, it’s very important to use ice and avoid heat for the first 48-72 hours. However, even if you hate cold, in this instance, you only need to use it for a short time. 

So in this example, the answer to WHAT’S BETTER…HEAT OR COLD? is…whichever one you like best! 

“It doesn’t help. The pain keeps coming back.”

Many people stop using heat and cold because it doesn’t keep the pain away. While it may feel better during the application or for a short time after, the pain comes back. You conclude it didn’t help and therefore wasn’t worth the time. This can be especially true for people whose pain has become chronic. 

To understand the reason the pain comes back, it’s helpful to think about the nature of tools. Tools are often limited to a particular use. A hammer, for example, is very useful if the task involves nails. We know the hammer will not help to tighten a screw so we don’t usually choose a hammer from the toolbox for jobs involving screws.  

If we look at heat and cold as tools, here are the “nails” for these particular “hammers.” Thermal modalities work by causing a temporary change in local blood flow and, in the case of ice, a temporary slowing of nerve conduction, meaning the message from your muscle takes longer to get to your brain, so the pain hurts less. The key word here is temporary. That defines the limitations of these particular tools. From this perspective, it might be anticipated that the pain would return.  

“If the pain keeps coming back, why should I bother to use it?”

One big reason is you feel better for the time the heat/ice is on! Let’s use heat as an example. If your pain was 6/10 and for the 20 minutes while using heat, your pain drops  to 2/10, that’s a much more enjoyable 20 minutes. The heat may also feel soothing and relaxing, which also helps pain. And if you use heat multiple times during the day, that’s potentially a much more enjoyable day. 

Another important benefit is what I like to call  the TLC effect. The TLC effect is one explanation for why Mommy  kissing your skinned knee takes the pain away. From an integrative medicine perspective, this loving attention is a powerful healing factor. When we apply ice or heat, we are in essence giving ourselves TLC. The overall healing effect of this simple act should not be underestimated. In my years of work with people with chronic pain, I’ve witnessed people transforming the quality of their lives by implementing consistent TLC, even something as simple as  using a heating pad twice a day. 

For information on using heat and cold as well as do’s and dont’s, this is a good article.  

https://www.healthline.com/health/chronic-pain/treating-pain-with-heat-and-cold#applying-heat-therapy