Your foot is a tripod
Original Blog Post from Gary Ward of Anatomy in Motion
“Your foot is a tripod. This means it adopts three points of contact to stand upon. In a perfect world, this would be your 1st metatarsal head (big toe knuckle); 5th metatarsal head (little toe knuckle); and your heel. But so often it isn’t. And yet… … There is always a tripod.
Here’s the interesting part. The biggest tripod under your foot is naturally the most optimal tripod as described above. Any other tripod is always a triangular shape of lesser size.
So is your weight in your big toe knuckle and not in your little toe knuckle or vice versa?
Do you miss your big toe knuckle out and use the end of your big toe to meet the ground?
Is it your middle toe knuckles that bear the weight of your body mass? This makes for a very narrow tripod and is often noticeable by hard skin under these areas.
Hard skin is a good indicator of where you spend your time in your feet.
Anything less than an optimal tripod adversely affects your whole foot and whole body’s joint mechanics. It leads to a distortion of the foot shape causing compression in some bones and tension in some tissues. Such things are then ‘diagnosed’ as syndromes, itis’s, or labelled as weak, flat, stiff, dysfunctional etc. All because you lost your tripod? It’s worth finding out, isn’t it? And getting to the bottom of a very simple solution that can bring your tripod back towards optimal and set the base, set the foundations upon which you can begin to set your body free again.
People talk a lot about pronation and supination (or being pronated or supinated), interestingly observation of the foot bones movement tells us that without an optimal tripod, you will not be able to do (or be) either. So it’s really a first port of call for getting your feet moving.”
Original Blog Post by Gary Ward, Anatomy In Motion / Gary Ward’s Instagram
