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.

So, that's one major issue.

The second is patellar tendonitis, and we talked about his in our knee video.

It's this whole train and track discussion that we've had.

If you want the train which is the patella, to ride up and down on that track correctly,

then you better make sure you keep that track straight.

If you're going to start bending and warping the track this way, that's going to happen

if you screw something up down at the ground here,

then that patella is not going to have a real easy time following up and down smoothly on

here.

You're going to get patellar issues, tracking issues,

which are going to lead to a lot of pain in your patellar tendon which can feel like little

knives going in every single time you squat.

Certainly something that you don't want.

So, most importantly, those are 5 big ways that these are screwing with your workouts,

but I want to try to show you a couple things that you might be able to do

to strengthen those muscles down here at the foot to get them a little bit more well-equipped

to handle the stresses from above.

Alright, so here's the 2 areas that we want to attack if you want to start trying to strengthen

the muscles in here.

Again, people might run and get orthotics, and that's a decent way to try to act as a

crutch, but it's not doing anything to actually fix the problem.

It's just filling in the gap here that you don't have in terms of your arch.

So, if we want to really try to get at this,

you want to look at the muscles that might potentially be weak that are causing what's

going on.

The first thing I want to be able to do is start strengthening the muscles actually in

your big toe.

Believe it or not, this big toe here can have a lot of force and power.

And assist you in lifting up your arch by being able to flex against the force of gravity

and against your own weight.

So, I'm going to show you an exercise that will target that and allow you to start doing

that.

Secondly, we want to start working on a muscles called the posterior tibialis, right.

So what I do is I attached this rubber band here to sort of see its function.

And basically it originates here on your tibia, it comes down and attaches right here in our

midfoot.

So, you can see that this is literally, when this contracts it's holding up the arch.

If I were to take this off, you see the arch collapses.

So what happens is, a lot of times people have a weakness in this muscle.

They don't have enough strength in this muscle to actually hold up and support the arch.

So, if there's a way that we can actually strengthen this posterior tibialis, that would

be awesome because we can get this to them hook on again, and it will allow it.

Not hook on.

It's always attached, but you know, the function of being able to lift this arch by making

it a lot more strong and be able to pull that up.

Alright, so first we want to cover that exercise that will help us to get those intrinsic muscles

underneath our toes to try to get a little bit stronger.

So all I have here, and all you'll need, is a quarter.

And you want to take, again, and excuse my ugly feet here.

My ugly flat feet.

They're like flippers.

You want to take the big bone right here at the base of your toe and step on the quarter

right at that spot, ok.

So right there.

Now, all you're trying to do here is push as hard as you can into the ground with the

front of your toes here especially your big toe,

and you want to try to do that, and what you're doing is, you're trying to lift up the arch.

Again, I've got incredibly flat feet.