back pain

December 15, 2010 Pain Relief

Arnica: The Pain Reliever No Household Should Be Without

Aches and pains happen, especially when you’re training at the gym or exerting yourself in any heavy lifting activity, like moving. And as we age, we’re prone to other painful conditions like osteoarthritis.

But you don’t have to suffer with muscle soreness and stiffness. You can get relief without risking some of the frightening side effects of NSAIDs (non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs) such as nausea, upset stomach, shortness of breath, heartburn or skin rashes.

There is a natural solution that I highly recommend instead: Arnica Montana. Arnica is a plant native to mountainous regions of Europe and North America that has been used for centuries as a topical pain relieving agent.

A controlled randomized study from 2007 found that daily applications of arnica gel were just as effective as ibuprofen for relieving pain from osteoarthritis.

There is a slight risk of allergic reaction to a compound called hellanin found in arnica, so test on a small bit of skin before rubbing it all over. If you do experience a slight rash, simply stop using the gel.

While arnica gels abound in health food and supplement stores, the brand that I most recommend is Traumeel. It’s widely available and extremely effective with a synergistic blend of arnica and other anti inflammatory homeopathic agents.

So, the next time you find yourself stiff, sore and achy, get yourself some arnica gel, rub it on, and breathe a sigh of relief as the pain melts away!

November 8, 2010 Pain Relief

Revealed: Why traditional back pain treatments like cortisone injections, muscle relaxants and NSAIDs won’t cure your back, neck and shoulder pain

Do you suffer from back pain that keeps you up at night and makes you feel older than your years?

Chances are, if you are reading this, you are plagued by chronic pain in your back, neck and shoulders that keeps you from doing the activities you enjoy.

Suffering with chronic or acute pain is one of the most frustrating conditions you could possibly experience. You can’t just vacate your body when the pain is too intense, so you wind up missing out on the activities you used to enjoy like cycling, rock climbing, horseback riding, surfing, snowboarding, gardening, and running.

If you’re avoiding activities you love because you’re afraid of making your back pain worse, you’re not alone. Back pain has reached epidemic proportions in America with 4 out of 5 people suffering from disabling back pain during their lifetimes, according to the National Institutes of Health. The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons reports that back pain is the second most common reason for doctor’s office visits.

With the medical bill for back pain skyrocketing to a mind-blowing $86 billion dollars a year–up 65% since 1998–we’re not seeing results. The Journal of the American Medical Association reported in 2008 that the percentage of back pain sufferers has increased and more people are reporting physical, social and work limitations as a result.

Sadly, the effects of long-term pain are far more insidious than missed work days and limited mobility. A study conducted by Northwestern University Medical School found that back pain lasting six months or longer results in abnormal brain chemistry, causing the brain to atrophy. Gray matter shrank as much as 11 percent, equivalent to the amount of brain mass that is lost over ten to twenty years of normal aging.

Ongoing back pain runs the risk of clinically impairing your ability to focus and concentrate.

But sadly, although most doctors hear complaints of back pain every single day in their practices,they are ill equipped to fully address the problem.

Standard treatment of back pain in a medical setting generally includes non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medications (NSAIDs), corticosteroid injections such as cortisol, basic physical therapy, and, finally, surgery.

Unfortunately, NSAIDs, such as Aspirin and Ibuprofen, and corticosteroid injections merely mask painful symptoms temporarily.

While medication will give you relief from the feeling of pain, the symptoms will come back when the effects of the drugs wear off because the deeper structural and neurological imbalances that were the root cause of your discomfort were never addressed.

The source of the pain in most cases is not from the spine and surrounding nerves but rather from the muscles, tendons and ligaments that support the anatomy, says Hubert L. Rosomoff, director of the Comprehensive Pain and Rehabilitation Center at the University of Miami School of Medicine.

Even worse, while under the influence of pain relieving medications, you’re likely to be extra active because you’ll feel more like your old self. This brings on additional pain and stiffness later due to the extra stress placed on the already imbalanced soft tissue.

Prescribing pain relieving drugs to treat the symptoms of back pain is like patching a crack in the wall of a house. Sure, the crack is gone, but the underlying instability in the house’s foundation that caused the crack to develop in the first place is still there, and that crack will appear again, if not in the same wall, elsewhere in the home.

As pain progresses and worsens, doctors often turn to surgery as a solution; however, recent studies have shown a failed back surgery rate as high as 50%.

Dr. Alok Sharan, spinal chief at New York’s Montefiore Medical Center, requires that his patients exhaust all non-surgical options prior to an operation. “Sometimes people jump to [back surgery] and think it will be a cure-all, and then five years later you need another procedure. If you’re only 40, that’s a big deal,” he says.

Long term relief can be yours, however, if you understand the basic key to healing back pain. But before we dive into that, I want to share with you some of the commonly held back pain myths that might be responsible for keeping you stuck in pain.

Back Pain Myths That Keep You From Healing

#1 The pain is in your back

This is probably THE most common mistake that people make when treating back pain: looking only at the back. I have seen clients who come in with detailed medical reports that have pinpointed the dysfunctional spinal vertebra seemingly causing all of their problems, and yet repeated treatments in this area are not yielding results.

Your spine does not exist in isolation inside your body. It is a structure who’s balance depends on the balance of everything around it, much like a suspension bridge. Never, not even once, have I worked with someone who suffered from back pain where the problem was entirely in their back. In fact, in 95% of my clients’ cases, the back is the last place we work, and at that point it is only to balance and integrate work done elsewhere.

Looking back at our example of the house with the faulty foundation, your feet, legs, and hips are the “foundation” for your back. If you have an imbalance anywhere in these structures, your back will reflect that. To get lasting relief from back pain, you must build a solid foundation.

#2 Back pain is a sudden-onset condition

It’s very common to assume that your back pain came on in a relatively short period of time. Usually, people notice acute pain after a specific event, like moving heavy furniture or a particularly grueling hike, so it’s easy to associate the pain with these activities.

In reality, the pain is just your body reaching its threshold for the physical imbalances you’ve had all your life. The activity is just a catalyst, the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak.

You have certain neurological habits–everyone does. Your coordination was developed at a young age and through repeated training. Sometimes these patterns serve you, and sometimes they hinder you or create muscular imbalances.

Wherever you go, your body will always fire the strongest and most often-used neurological pathways because this is the most efficient way to move. It would really be a chore if you had to relearn to walk every day when you got out of bed! As you get older, your favorite pathways become stronger and stronger, which serves you in efficiency but sets you up for physical pain if they’re not 100% balanced.

To fully address your pain, you must find balanced movement patterns that won’t pull your body more to one side or the other.

#3 Your skeletal alignment (or mis-alignment) is the cause of your pain

This is a half truth. In reality, if your bones are lined up, life is pretty good in your body. Where we get confused is in thinking it’s the bones that determine our body alignment.

Think back to the skeleton that lurked in the corner of your high school science classroom. Did you get to go play with it during anatomy lessons? If you did, you probably noticed that all the bones were wired together and the whole thing hung from a hook.

If you stack up a pile of bones, it won’t stay stacked up. They’ll just fall right down again. It’s the muscles, tendons, and ligaments that keep your bones in place. Bones are really just spacers for your tissue, levers that your muscles can pull on for locomotion.

Your posture is determined by tissue length, not bony alignment. To make lasting changes to your physical alignment, you’ll get much more bang for your buck if you work with soft tissue.

#4 Stretching will take the pain away

Stretching certainly does give good kinesthetic feedback, but I stretched diligently for years and never got one iota more flexible. Why is this?

Well, your muscles are actually plenty long enough. It’s not your muscle’s physical length that inhibits flexibility, but rather the neurological “set point” that keeps you from over stretching it.

For example, imagine an 85 year old man who is so stiff he can barely limp up a flight of stairs. He goes in for surgery and the nurses put him under anesthesia. While under the influence of the drug, the medical staff has to be extremely careful when they move the man because he is so flexible that they can risk dislocating one of his joints. If they wanted to, they could easily tuck his foot behind his head. As soon as the man wakes up and the effects of the anesthesia wear off, however, he is just as stiff as before he went under the drug.

So, if our muscles are long enough to give us all the flexibility we need, why is it so uncomfortable to stretch? The nervous system is responsible for your range of motion. When you “stretch” the muscle, tiny little sensory receptor cells in the tissue send a signal to your brain that you’re getting close to your flexibility threshold beyond which your body believes that your muscle might actually tear. The muscle then contracts in response to prevent over-stretching, and this is the slightly painful feeling you get when you stretch to your full range of motion.

If you incurred an injury, you may have scar tissue that is too fibrous to stretch. If your body is imbalanced–which, if you’re experiencing back pain, it most definitely is–tight muscles are usually compensating for something that’s too loose elsewhere. Thus, pulling endlessly on these muscles trying to get them to lengthen out won’t ever succeed. You have to address both issues.

Additionally, if you haven’t moved a body part for a long time–say you injured your shoulder playing tennis and have favored it ever since–your body will create adhesions in the connective tissue network that prevent your muscles from moving as freely as they once did. It’s imperative to break up these adhesions in order to restore your range of motion.

The True Causes of Back Pain

Back pain is caused by one of two issues in the body: a lack of stability or a lack of mobility. These are actually two sides of the same coin. Where your body is not properly supported–a lack of stability–there will be additional tension to compensate, creating a lack of mobility. Also, if an area of your body is hyper mobile, your muscles will tighten elsewhere to increase the level of support.

In order for your body to function optimally, you must have adequate support. Your body is an incredible feat of engineering, a system of levers and pulleys more complex than any machine we could ever hope to create. Each tiny joint in your body supports a system of joints above and below it. Irregularities in movement in one tiny area of the body can affect the functioning of everything else.

If we look at a body in standing, we can see that the foot and ankle support the knee, which in turn supports the hip joint. Misalignments in any of these three will cause the pelvis to be uneven.

The sacrum–a large, triangular bone at the base of your spine comprised of fused vertebra–fits into the pelvis much like the keystone of an arch. If the two pelvic bones are imbalanced, it will torque the sacrum, putting strain on the sacro-illiac joints and causing lower back pain.

An imbalanced pelvis also affects the upper back, neck, and shoulders. The sacrum is the foundation of the spine; if it’s rotated or crooked, it will affect all of the vertebra above it. Without a stable base, your upper body will brace to support an upright posture, leaving you with limited range of motion in your neck and shoulders.

Therefore, a misalignment or lack of mobility in your ankle can–and does–affect the functioning of your neck. If you’ve been receiving localized treatment to your spine without results, it’s most likely because the root of the problem lies elsewhere in your body.

It is only through treating the body as a whole, synergistic organism that we can deeply address the structural imbalances that are the root cause of back, neck and shoulder pain.

A Natural Pain Solution

In the 1970s, biochemist Ida P. Rolf pioneered the field of myofascial organization. Continually seeking solutions to her own health challenges and those of her two sons, she explored the fields of homeopathy, osteopathy and chiropractic. As she pursued her research, Rolf discovered a correlation between physical alignment and health, noting that when the body was properly aligned in gravity, symptoms such as pain, inflexibility, anxiety and stress vanished.

Her work, which she called Structural Integration and later came to be known affectionately as “Rolfing,” has been used successfully to treat athletes and active individuals looking to get relief from pain and improve athletic performance for the last 40 years.

Rolfing affects physical alignment through gentle manipulation of the connective tissue matrix. Connective tissue, or fascia, is exactly what it sounds like: tissue that functions as a giant web in your body and covers every bone, nerve, organ, muscle, tendon, and ligament, right down to the cellular level. Adjusting the length of fascia within the body shifts posture by changing the way bones are linked together.

Bones act only as levers and spacers in the body. They give the soft tissue–muscles, tendons and ligaments–something to grab onto in order to generate locomotion and make your body move. So, if the tissue is too tight or too loose, it will actually pull your skeletal structure out of alignment. Fortunately, fascia is rich in tiny receptor cells called proprioceptors, which tell the body where it is in relation to the space around it. By gently stimulating these incredibly smart neurological cells, Rolfers can affect changes in the tissue length and quality, influencing flexibility and range of motion practically instantaneously. That coupled with client awareness and neurological re-education forms the foundation for correcting structural imbalances.

http://www.sxc.hu/profile/igowerf

Dr. Oz recommends Rolfing for chronic muscular pain and tension.

“Rolfing literally releases the joints. When you talk to folks about the impact it has on them, a lot of them just stand taller. A lot is just freeing you up to live the way you’re supposed to live.”

– Dr. Oz

February 12, 2010 Pain Relief

Pain, Pain, Go Away…The 7 Mistakes That Are Making Your Pain Persist

So often, pain plagues us for years, rearing its ugly head at the most inopportune times, like right before a sporting event, while we’re on vacation, or when the weather finally turns to sun and it’s time to get outside and play.

Even worse, it can be a persistent thorn in your side for years; you might find that you wake each morning covered in aches, stiff, and unwilling to move.

Those who suffer with chronic or acute pain don’t do so willingly. In fact, according to the American Chiropractic Association, Americans spend at least $50 billion each year on back pain, and experts estimate that as much as 80% of the population will experience back pain at some point in their lives.

Most doctors, if they are unable to find a direct medical cause of the pain such as a herniated disk or spinal stenosis, chalk pain up to “just a part of getting older,” leaving patients with little hope of long term healing. The truth is that aging does not have to be accompanied by the myriad aches and pains our Western civilization has come to expect.

In his lecture series, The New Physics of Healing, Deepak Chopra refers to studies done on indigenous tribes where the perception of a person as he or she ages actually increases in value. So, for example, a 30 year-old is much more highly regarded in athletic ability and mental wit than a 20 year-old, and so on and so forth. In this culture, the population did not decline as they aged, but actually improved in cardiovascular health and athletic ability (as measured by their ability to run long distances – their main form of delivering messages between tribes). Similar studies also invalidate the notion that aging necessitates physical and mental decline.

So, if pain isn’t a necessary part of aging, why are so many people plagued by chronic discomfort? Following are the seven reasons I see clients get stuck running in circles, unable to achieve the results they’re dreaming of.

Mistake #1: Continuing to do what doesn’t work

It’s common for someone to try a healing modality because a friend or family member had success with that path. Usually, clients will go to the same therapist that treated the referrer. This is generally a good strategy, but if you’re not getting the results you want, don’t keep flogging a dead horse. It may be that the therapist isn’t a good match for you or that you need someone with slightly different skills. Your body may respond better to a different modality. Don’t be afraid to end treatment if it’s not getting you to where you need to be.

Mistake #2: Assuming there is only one solution

In contrast, some people bounce from practitioner to practitioner, seeking the “miracle cure” that will banish their pain. They try one session of massage, two with an acupuncturist, and then hit up a Rolfer for three sessions, never sticking with anything long enough to evaluate whether or not they’re getting results.

When you set out to heal your body, you have to understand that there is no magic bullet. Accepting that fact will allow you to be proactive and engaged in your healing process. Ask lots of questions and educate yourself about the different therapies. If you’re getting results, however small the measure, keep working with the therapist or modality that is moving you forward. Slowly add additional modalities, one at a time, until you find two or three that have a symbiotic relationship for your body. And, most importantly, keep an open mind. Assuming that you know it all, have tried everything, and that you know what does or doesn’t work will tend to keep you stuck in a rut. You never know what new tidbit of knowledge will be the secret key to unlocking your vitality.

Mistake #3: Not working with the right mentors

Commonly, clients show up asking to be “fixed.” They say, “I just want you to fix me so I can get back to my old life.” I hate to break it to you, but a) you can’t time travel backwards – the body you have now is the body you have to work with from this point forward, and b) no one can “fix” you; it’s an inside job.

Healing pain runs deeper than just “fixing” a sore spot on your body. Pain is intricately linked with our mental and emotional states as well as our physical well being. At the very least, if you are stepping out on your healing journey, it’s essential to have the support of a body mentor, spiritual mentor, and counselor or therapist. You may find that you have several in one category, such as an acupuncturist and structural integrator for your body, or one individual may be ideal. Dealing with all aspects of pain will help you to change the patterns that got you into your current state, developing healthier habits that will support whole body wellness.

Mistake #4: Treating only the symptoms

This could be the most common stumbling block that I see my clients facing. Western medicine, in its endeavor to divide and categorize the body, has given us the false notion that we are some sort of soft machine, a marvel of engineering with interchangeable parts, where organs and tissues can be extracted and replaced with no effect whatsoever on the organism as a whole.

Please don’t get me wrong; western medicine has produced marvels in healing and definitely has its place in the world. Believe me, if I am in a serious car accident and need to be taken to the ER, I want the best MD in the world there to sew me back up!

But, when it comes to back pain, the tendency to want to pinpoint one tiny fulcrum of pain tends to leave the patient struggling and without solution. Here’s why: Your body is intricately linked together; each tiny, microscopic cell is connected to the one next to it, and the one next to that, and so on. Every joint in your body affects the functioning of the joints that immediately surround it. If you injure a joint, there is a ripple effect through the body, much like the rings in a pond when you toss in a stone. It is impossible to focus solely on a knee, a hip, or a facet joint of the spine without also looking at the joints above and below it.

Most treatments only focus on the condition or diagnosis, i.e. sciatica, herniated disc, etc. In reality, your body underwent many stages of misalignment before developing severe conditions and debilitating pain, all starting with an imbalanced physical structure. Treating only the condition equates to treating only the result of the imbalance instead of going directly to the root cause of the pain. And, if there is no medical condition, doctors will often tell you that the pain and discomfort you are experiencing is “just part of getting older.” In fact, it’s usually indicative of an underlying imbalance that will worsen if you don’t intercept it.

I highly recommend working with therapists who take a whole body balance approach to healing pain, such as a structural integrator. Your results will be deeper and tend to last much longer than treatment that only focuses on the symptom.

Mistake #5: Not dealing with pain the first time

We’re all busy, and no one wants to put a halt to their life just because of a little back stiffness, right? Even worse, we don’t want to sound “whiny” or get labeled as a hypochondriac. So, it’s no surprise that most people don’t treat back pain the first time it happens.

Barring any major bodily injury such as a bad fall from a horse or a horrendous car accident, back pain doesn’t come on suddenly or overnight. It’s a progression, a slow deterioration perpetuated by daily habits. If you are experiencing even mild discomfort in your back, neck, and shoulders, it’s a sign that all is not well and if you don’t get treatment immediately, you’re setting yourself up for a much more difficult healing task down the road.

This is exceptionally challenging for athletes to come to grips with as excelling in sports necessitates a tough mentality. If you quit at the first sign of pain and discomfort, it’s unlikely that you’ll make it very far as an athlete; therefore, I recommend that athletes find a solid core of body care professionals, set up a scheduled treatment program, and stick to it (no canceling appointments just because you feel healthy and well this week)! This will help to catch any minor imbalances in their early stages, reducing the risk of greater injury and pain later on.

Mistake #6: Not understanding that healing back pain is a process

In a world of quick fixes and magic cures, we all want to take the fastest road to health that we can. But, like losing weight, healing pain is a process and can take some time. The only way to get from A to B is to put one foot in front of the other, keep walking, and don’t let minor setbacks discourage you. Healing your body is a journey of self discovery, and it can be uncomfortable to say the least. It forces you to take a look at your life, at the areas that are serving you and those which are not. Just like losing weight means letting go of habits that are destroying your health, facing your back pain head on will mean that you must change the way you are living to some degree.

Pain is almost always correlated to an emotional state. There is absolutely a connection between stress and pain, in part because stress causes the body to emit certain neurochemicals that create inflammation and tension, and also because stress causes us to focus less on taking care of our well being (the economic downfall of 2008 saw increased work hours and a corresponding spike in computer related shoulder pain). Dealing with stress goes much deeper than swallowing a pill; it requires us to allocate time for self care and to incorporate practices that support a calm, relaxed state of being, like meditation, qi gong, tai chi, and yoga. All of these take time to have an effect on your body and life. Choosing a program of bodywork, exercise, and stress management and sticking with it is crucial to long term success in healing your pain.

Mistake #7: Not taking action

Making this mistake will most certainly keep you trapped and in pain for years to come. No one can take action on your behalf – no one! If you want to heal your body, you must become an active participant in your healing process, and that means making appointments with experienced bodyworkers, incorporating daily activity into your life, being proactive about stress management, and educating yourself about every single aspect of healing from pain.

Although it’s easier to sit on the couch and wonder why this happened to you, or even to just push through the pain, continuing to do all the same sports and other activities (weekend warriors, I’m looking at you on this one) until you just can’t bear it any longer, refusing to actively seek relief or taking refuge in pain relieving drugs that mask symptoms is the same as choosing to shorten the number of years that you will be physically able to remain active. The choice is entirely yours.

December 4, 2009 Pain Relief

Could Your Feet Be the Source of That Pain In Your Neck?

“The human foot is a work of art and a masterpiece of engineering.”

-Leonardo DaVinci

Okay ladies, I know you love those cute shoes you scored for a screaming deal on Black Friday! The cute heels (that really aren’t too high), peep toe, patten leather…how could you resist, right? Shoes absolutely make the outfit! And, believe me, as a 6’0″ woman who spent years wanting to minimize my height, I’m very aware that finding an attractive flat shoe is much easier said than done.

But, your feet are the foundation for your entire body structure. The human foot is comprised of 26 bones, 33 joints, and over 100 muscles and tendons. All of the tiny structures of your feet combine to create a supportive yet resilient structure that carries you in standing and moving.

Unfortunately, Western society suffers from “Urban Foot Syndrome;” our feet are habitually crammed into poorly designed footwear that cramps and limits the movement of our bones, joints, tendons and ligaments. Further complicating the issue, when our feet fail us and plague us with pain and inflammation due to the fact that they’re squished into faulty footwear, we add more devices, lifts, arch supports, and other “corrective” paraphernalia to our shoes in an effort to prop the foot into a natural position.

All of this stabilization of the foot negates is natural purpose: movement! Have you ever felt a cat’s paw? Have you worked your fingers between their toes, squished around the tiny little bones? If you have, you’ll know how soft and malleable their feet are. If you haven’t had this experience, quick, find a cat, preferably one with clean paws and trimmed claws!

Our feet should be as soft and pliable as the cat’s paw. This would allow us to adapt to uneven surfaces, like rocks, dirt paths, hillsides, tufts of grass, etc. Urban warriors live in a world of paved roads and paths, staircases built into our city trails. Everything is smooth and even, so our feet don’t have much of a chance to feel what it’s like to walk with the earth.

The images below are from a study published in 1905 by the American Journal of Orthopedic Surgery.

Notice how the shod feet have restructured themselves to look exactly like the shape of the shoes. That’s not a natural shape for a human foot! Even more frightening is the below image comparing a modern, high-heeled shoe and ancient Chinese foot binding.

“When a woman wears a high heeled shoe, the anatomy is changed and the pressure is put on the heads of the metatarsals rather than the base where it is designed to be (shown in the picture).” Beverly Hills Aesthetic Foot Surgery

High heels are a form of modern day foot binding. They make our feet appear smaller, cuter, and make women look taller. Rarely does a trip to Nordstrom or Macy’s reveal hot new trends in flexible, natural footwear. Our footwear is mostly driven by the fashion industry, and stilettos aren’t showing any sign of vanishing soon.

Raising the heel any amount affects the posture of the entire body, shifts the balance of weight in the foot, and causes changes to spinal curvature. As you can see in the diagram below, there is a natural plumb line that falls down the lateral side of your body (Figure A). When you are standing with your weight properly balanced over your feet, the spine and back are relaxed and balanced, allowing freedom of movement.

In Figure B, the addition of high heels shifts the plumb line. It’s impossible to stay upright with weight centered over the eye of the foot (the space just in front of your heel) when wearing heels. Instead, it’s necessary to contract the muscles of the lower back, pulling your weight over your center of gravity again. As you can see in Figure C, this causes increased curvature of the lumbar spine (lower back), resulting in back pain and other tension throughout the body.

What does a natural foot look like? Studies done by the American Journal of Orthopedic Surgery show that in native barefoot population of the Philippines and Central Africa, the toes spread easily and naturally to create a wide base of support for standing and walking. Also, you can draw a line from the big toe through the ball and heel of the foot. No such line exists in the shod foot.

The world-record for the marathon was set by Ethiopian Abebe Bikila. He ran it in 2:15:17 at the 1960 Olympics in Rome.

Barefoot.

“People have been running barefoot for millions of years and it has only been since 1972 that people have been wearing shoes with thick, synthetic heels,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Studies and anecdotal evidence alike have shown that the thick-soled, highly supportive shoes popularized by companies such as Nike have done nothing to decrease injury and incidences of plantar fascitis. From a purely functional standpoint, these shoes just don’t make sense.

Your foot was created to be the perfect springboard, propelling you forward with every step. There is a highly sophisticated system of ligaments connecting the bones of the foot. Three arches transfer weight during walking: medial, lateral, and transverse. The medial arch is the one most people are familiar with and is found on the inside of your foot. The lateral arch runs parallel to that, and the transverse arch is just behind your toes.

Your medial arch collapses with each step as the weight of your body comes over it. The ligaments stretch, triggering proprioceptors (cells that tell your body where it is in space and how much each muscle fiber has been stretched). The proprioceptors send a signal to your brain that they’ve been stretched, causing a contraction to take place that propels the arch upwards, and your body forwards.

When you insert an arch support under this amazing structure, it defeats the whole purpose of having an arch in the first place. Yes, now your foot is lifted and you may temporarily experience less back pain, but in the long run, you’ve taken away your gas pedal. Now every step costs you extra tension and more work; you’re no longer moving forward efficiently.

That increased level of tension results in new, different aches and pains. The quadricep muscles become hypertonic – overly contracted – pulling your pelvis forward and causing your hamstrings to shorten in response. This results in…you guessed it! More back pain.

Natural walking feels like floating. It’s as though your body is suspended from an invisible hook in the sky as your feet glide across the earth, stepping effortlessly on hillocks, pebbles, curves and dips in the ground. The Native Americans commented with European settlement that the “white man bruises the earth with his step.” Natural walking allows you to walk with the earth, feeling the texture of the ground beneath your feet.

So how do you get the natural walking effect in an urban jungle?

The challenge for most of us is that, even if it were acceptable to go barefoot everywhere, it’s just not safe. The streets are littered with debris like broken glass and rusty nails, and no one wants a fungal infection from traipsing barefoot through gyms, grocery stores, and other high-traffic locales. But if you’re looking for that barefoot feeling, you’re in luck!

Lately, shoe companies have gotten hip to the fact that the Africans are kicking our butts in the Olympics…barefoot. They’re developing shoes that mimic the experience while still providing protection from the elements. Some of the best picks include the Vibram 5 Finger Technology and Nike Free.

“But I have flat feet…”

So do babies. Arches aren’t created until we start walking as children – and the key word there is created. Adding arch support to flat feet doesn’t create an arch, it props the foot up, like putting a jack under a car with a flat tire.

Arch supports may be appropriate for a time while you work to create a more functional foot, but you’ll want to wean yourself off of them by increasing the time that your foot is without support. Arch supports cause the muscles in your foot to become flaccid and lazy because the wedge is doing all the work. Strengthen your feet by walking barefoot (or in barefoot technology shoes), starting with 15 minutes a day and increasing the time by five minute increments each week. Also, simply laying a towel on a slick floor, such as tile, linoleum, or hardwood, and using your bare foot to scrunch the towel and then spread it out again will work the muscles of the foot, building your arch.

For athletes and other active individuals, I highly recommend training barefoot. I competed in kettlebells and always lifted barefoot – squats, deadlifts, cleans, snatches, keg walks, jerks…you name it, I was doing it barefoot. During competitions, I used a thin, bendable shoe that closely mimicked barefoot lifting. I even traded in my stiff, rigid riding boots for a flexible, moccasin-like boot that protected my foot while still giving me sensory perception and mobility for horseback riding.

You’ll be amazed when you begin to restore your relationship with your feet how your entire body shifts; tension melts, pain disappears, and you have more energy.