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What's up, guys?
Jeff Cavaliere, ATHLEANX.COM.
If you've got flat feet and you're working out, then this is one video that you can't
miss.
Today I'm going to show you 5 ways that flat feet are flat out f***ing you up in your workouts.
And I'm going to explain each one of them to you today.
I'm going to have Raymond show you on his own body why that is.
And most importantly, I'm going to show you 2 ways that you can try to start fixing it
yourself.
Alright, so we've got a big video here, an important video.
Raymond got dressed up for it.
That just shows you how important this really is.
Especially if you've got flat feet.
As I said, there are 5 ways that it is really really effecting your workouts.
And I'm going to start by showing you down at the ground exactly what's going on with
our feet.
And then you can start to understand why it's so bad and what it's implications are for
your workouts.
Alright.
So, let's take a look at these feet and see what I'm talking about when I say flat feet.
Again, you know if you have them what's going on.
But for those that don't, this is what's important.
You're supposed to have spacing here on the inside of your foot.
You're supposed to have a natural arch, ok, some room in here to actually get, I don't
know, even a pen or something on the ground
that you can still stand over and not squoosh it to the ground.
Here, you can see that that would be impossible.
There's absolutely no space here for my hand.
That is an absence of an arch.
Now, there's a lot of things that can cause this, guys.
There can be congenital/inherited things.
There can be just general laxity.
There could be dysfunctions of the muscles themselves.
There's not really a real definitive cause but when you have them, you've got to do something
about treating them.
So, I'm going to get into the exact ways that this is going to cause a problem and then
show you how to, most importantly, try to combat this and fix this yourself.
Ok, first up, and a real big one here, especially if you guys are squatting at all, you're going
to have a real hard time maintaining proper squat mechanics
if you're squatting with uncorrected flat feet.
The reason being is, all you have to do is look at what happens on the ground.
I talk about it all the time, guys.
It's a chain reaction.
Everything starts from the ground up.
You can see that on this side here, that when the foot has an arch,
it allows the ankle, knee, and hip to stay in alignment because that arch elevates the
foot just enough to keep that tibia right here in line with the knee,
right here in line with the hip, ok.
So, everything can kind of move in line the way it's supposed to.
This is a little bit exaggerated here, but you can see down at the ground, when the arch
is collapsed,
what happens is, the heel kicks out to the side here, and it brings the tibia and it
rotates it inward.
As soon as you do this, you're obviously causing a torque right here at the knee because this
inward rotation here at the tibia causes this torquing.
So, you're probably going to have some knee pain.
We'll talk about that again in a little while, but it also completely misaligns this track,
ok.
The track is now off-track, as we say, and I've said before, the patella runs on a track.
It should run nice and straight up here like this.
Here it obviously is not.
You're going to have some knee issues.
You're then going to have implications up here at the hip.
You're not going to be able to really keep your knees out the way you should during a
squat because it's already internally rotated and caving in this way.
You could get some ligament stress on the inside of the knee, and then up here at your
back.
Obviously if you're having hip issues, you're going to get compensations at your back and
that can cause a whole host of issues too.
So, we want to make sure that if we're going to be squatting, we've got to do something
about these flat feet.
Ok.
Number 2.
You're going to get knee stress and even hip stress, really, for that matter, and back
stress with jumping if you don't have a good solid arch.
Why?
Because this arch down here allows for an eccentric loading of the foot to allow you
to actually absorb the landing.
Think about it.
Even in your quads when you do a jump, and you jump and you land.
If you jump and you land with straight legs, you have no absorption of that landing.
But if you allow your knees to bend into a squat, you let the quads take on the eccentric
loading so you can soften the landing.
The same thing happens down here at the foot.
If you have a nice arch here, when you land, you absorb it through this excursion from
up top, down to a flat foot.
If you look at it over here, this person has jumping and landing, they've got no room,
right?
They're landing flat every single time.
There is no eccentric slowing down or loading of that foot to take away some of the stress
that gets thrown up into the knee, and then up into the hip and obviously into the low
back.
So, think about it.
Box Jumps, Jumping Jacks, Jump Rope, all the things that you could be doing, anything that
you're doing where you have to be jumping.
Even explosive lifts like Hang Cleans, if you're not really absorbing down here at the
foot, then you're really sending all that shock, it's got to go somewhere, guys.
You're sending all that shock up into the knee, up into the hip, and into the back.
Ok.
So, now listen up all you running athletes.
If you have flat feet, you're going to have a hard time developing adequate running power
and speed.
The reason being is there's 2 main functions of the feet.
The first one we talked about already.
It has to be able to adapt to the surface that you step on.
So, when you put your foot down, because the arch is there, it allows you to eccentrically
adapt to that surface.
What happens is the midfoot joints here loosen up, allow you to sort of adapt to whatever
the shape and surface is that you're standing on,
but the second main function of the foot is, it must be able to become a rigid lever.
It has to be a rigid level, one that you can propel your body off of as you run.
So, as the foot goes back into swing phase and you're going to now push off to allow
yourself to then take your next step,
you have to have an ability to lock up this mid-joint so you go into plantar flexion.
You push off your calf, right?
You get into plantar flexion.
All these joints in here lock up and now become a real rigid lever.
Literally, they functionally become rigid, mechanically so you can push off with that.
Well, someone that has a flat foot, they're really doing a much better job of adapting
to the surface, but they do a really poor job of pushing off behind for any power or
strength.
So, if you've got flat feet, good luck trying to generate as much power as somebody that
doesn't have it.
Likely, and especially in sprinting where every tenth of a second matters, you're likely
going to have a hard time keeping up.
Ok, the next issue that we run into is a big issue I've talked about many times on our
channel here, glute amnesia, and how that impacts a lot of the things that we do.
Basically, any lower body exercise, because you want in a perfect world, the glutes to
be working with the hamstrings, alright.
If they go to sleep and if they have amnesia and they're not working as well as they should,
you put a lot more stress on the hamstring than it should have
because it really wants to work in concert with the glutes together.
So, how do we do that?
What's causing it?
Well, you've got to go back again to the original thing, as I said.
When the foot collapses, then the tibia collapses as well, when that happens, the knee kicks
in.
You get torque on the knee.
The hip becomes internally rotated.
So now when the hip is internally rotated here, what happens?
The muscles that externally rotate the hips, especially the glute medius kind of go on
constant stretch and a long stretch,
and they become weak.
So, you get long, stretched out glute medius they get weak.
As soon as those become weak, as I've said,
now you've taken out a huge chunk of muscle who's real main function is to assist in all
of your lower body strengthening and power and function.
Once that goes to sleep, you're putting a hell of a lot of stress on muscles that aren't
really allowed to, or strong enough to really take on that role of two
and they wind up getting hurt so you can get hamstring injuries.
You can get, again, back issues because again the muscles above and below,
the non-functioning muscles usually going to wind up having an issue.
So, glute amnesia, a bad thing,
but it's really starting all the way down here at the foot because of what's going on
with that arch.
Finally, we've got the other issues that you see.
Again, I've already talked about a whole bunch, but patellar tendonitis and plantar fasciitis.
Two big things that wind up usually following in sequence with somebody that's got chronically
flat feet.
Why?
Because you can see that if this foot collapses like this one over here is, if it collapses
down to the ground,
you've got constant tension stress on the plantar fascia underneath your foot.
If that's the case, you get just this constant pulling.
It's not really an inflammatory condition.
It's actually just a chronic degeneration of that tendon because of the pulling on both
sides of its attachments.