👣 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? (Green lines on image above) 🔺Is it your middle toe knuckles that bear the weight of your body mass? This makes for a very narrow tripod (blue line on image above) 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 a sub-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 🦶 😃

Common Questions / Answers

Question: I’ve got a callous on the 2nd/3rd metatarsal area. Couldn’t figure out why but this makes sense. I have hypermobility and 1st thing every morning it hurts to walk. Feels like every joint in my foot objects.

Answer: It’s interesting you say hyper mobility, but the fact you stand on two particular points suggests that aspects of your foot is not. Hypermobile can be tracked as joints being hyper-mobile matched with joints that are exactly the opposite. Human movement is an exchange of joints compression and decompressing, and opening and closing. The goal is to guide you to move your structures to optimise all of this. The tripod is a simple way in to recognise that the exchange isn’t occurring as you would like, and that something can be done to seek a better way 😊

Question: What’s a good exercise for training for biggest tripod?

Answer: It’s not about an ‘exercise’ to be honest. As everybody turns an exercise into “try harder” and “get better at it”. What we are looking to do is create an experience of what it’s like to move your foot bones on that biggest tripod. So rather than try harder at bringing our metheads / toe knuckles to the ground, we use our AiM wedges to create the experience of them already being on the floor and using movement to re-educate our feet to pronate and supinate. We bring the ground to meet the foot. Not the foot to meet the ground. If interested it’s all in the self-assessment ‘Wake Your Feet Up’ programme that I created to help people take ownership of their own body. It has almost three hours of this + exercises to re-educate our feet and bodies to thrive again 🙌🏼

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