How to use your feet to detect body-stiffness

Are you standing well-balanced?
“Yes”

Is your weight equally distributed between your heels and the balls of your feet?
“Yes”

But how do you know that you're standing well-balanced?
Maybe your weight should be more on the balls of your feet?
… or more on your heels?

Let's find out.

Think of your foot as a lever

The leverage of a foot depends on how far the weight-bearing points are from the pivot.

Your ankle is the pivot.
The heel and ball of the foot are the two weight-bearing points.
Those are the parts of your foot that actually press into the floor as you stand.

The distance forward from the ankle to the ball of the foot is approximately four times the distance back from the ankle to the heel.

Do you remember the mechanics of levers from your school days? Then you'll know that that means the weight on your heel is going to be four times the weight on the ball of the foot.

“But that can't be right”

“If I let there be that much weight on my heel, it makes me fall backwards. I stiffen more when trying to do that than when I've got my weight equally distributed between the front and back of my foot.”

Very true, you do stiffen
… and the reason you stiffen is because you're not used to balancing like that.

You feel like you're going to fall backwards
… so you stiffen to save yourself.

Just exactly as you would if you were trying to balance on top of a low, narrow wall.

You won't stop stiffening until you've learned to balance there.
Once you do learn to balance, you won't stiffen any more
… and only then will you begin to realise just how much you've been stiffening all along — even when you thought you were in balance.

Don't take my word for it …

Let's do an experiment

Let's make a model of the foot-lever.

Imagine pushing down on a pencil suspended between two erasers.

Like this:

• The pencil is your foot.
• The eraser at the end of the pencil is the ground under your heel.
• The eraser near the tip of the pencil is the ground under the ball of your foot.
• The finger pushing down on the pencil is your leg bone. It's resting on the foot at your ankle.

Notice the distance to the ball of the foot is much greater than the distance to the heel.

As you push down with your finger, which part of the pencil is heavier to lift?

The ball of the foot?
… or the heel?

Get a pencil and try it.

Lift each end in turn. See how much more weight there is on the heel.

Your foot, then, is your balance-meter

Until you get used to standing in balance:–
You feel in balance when you aren't
… and you feel off-balance when you aren't.

You needed a reliable measuring tool and, now you've learned to read it correctly, your foot is it.

The big question is: are you going to trust it?
… or are you going to stay as stiff as you are?

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