Or maybe you feel like all the weight is in your toes? Or your heels? Maybe its been like this for a long time.
WHY has this happened?
Our brains react to that trauma with the fight/flight response for survival, whether the trauma is big or small. This survival mechanism is great until it becomes a learned posture pattern. The new posture is seen as the new best way but is actually an “imbalance” from a system trying to protect us.
So perhaps a sprained ankle can lead to a lifetime of never truly weight bearing on that foot again. Our brain learnt that this is a painful thing to do at the time of injury and even after it has healed, it got stuck in a feedback loop that weight bearing on the injured side equals pain. That is until we re-teach the brain that this is a safe movement again.
That’s what we do at Boroondara Osteopathy – we teach people how to move freely in the areas they have compensated.
Think of it this way…
If someone has been holding their weight over a certain spot in the foot for a long time (from a past injury/trauma), this may present as foot pain like plantar fasciitis or other types of foot pain.
Often it’s not even foot pain, but knee or back pain, or somewhere else in the body. Along with managing the acute symptoms of these presentations, looking at shifting their weight away (unloading) from the current painful site and balancing the foot pressures may be beneficial. This might involve teaching the whole body to move towards the foot that isn’t carrying as much weight, or be as simple as teaching the pelvis to move forwards/backwards, twist or flow side-to-side, to even out the mass to be balanced over the feet. It depends on what we find as the reason you compensated in the first place.
By balancing out your foot pressures, weight is distributed more evenly. That can only be a good thing long-term.
The goal is to show the body new spaces to move in to, to encourage freer movement.
When the brain learns to move more effectively and fluently, it is more likely to maintain the movement for the future!
