Your Foot Foundation In Yoga Postures

Your feet are the foundation of your standing postures

Those wonderful glorious feet are, unfortunately, kept in containers (shoes) most of the day. The poor things have quite a responsibility in both our everyday walking/living life, and particularly in our yoga practice. The foot foundation is useful in both. As a therapist, the feet are one of the first things I look at as it’s important to see what someone is standing on all day. As a yoga teacher, I’ve learned to look at foundation first, which is feet in standing postures.

Foot anatomy

The foot itself is made up of 26 bones (major bones) all inter-relating and articulating against one another in a complex bone structure. Why so many bones in such a small area? Don’t you find it helpful that our foot is able to adapt to a myriad of surfaces and terrains such as rocky roads, a forest walk including sticks, twigs, and holes in the ground? Our foot is able to mold to the ground because of the interaction of these 26 bones. It then transfers the force from below up through the ankle joints and to the rest of our body in such a way that we stay balanced.

The foot is our foundation because it is meeting with the ground which generally doesn’t change, particularly in our yoga practice. I don’t know about you but I haven’t practiced on a particularly uneven surface in years. So we build our foundation on the ground. And, if the foundation isn’t right everything above has the potential to go awry. We find a similar principle with the foundation of a house. If you lay the foundation and it settles unevenly or one side drops significantly more than the other, will the windows upstairs close properly? Will the front door close properly?

The three arches of the foot

Our foot foundation is built on three arches, yup, you read correctly. Certainly we’re almost all familiar with the one on the inside (medial side) of the foot which teachers are constantly telling us to engage, but there are also two others. One of these is found on the outside of the foot although it’s not quite as prominent. The third arch runs across the base of the toes. Do you ever notice that your foot gets wider when you stand on it? This is the reason you measure your foot when standing. It’s because your foot gets slightly longer along the lines of the first two arches mentioned and wider along the third.

Essentially we’re standing on a triangle with one point at the base of the big toe, one at the base of the little toe, and one at our heel. Connect these three points together and you get a triangle. Take these three points and connect them to the top of the ankle joint and now we’ve created a pyramid. And that, my friends, is a very stable structure to be standing on.

The arches have three elements. There is bone shape, ligamentous and fascial connections, and the third is the musculature in the front, back and sides of the calf. All of these together maintain the arches and create a foot foundation. If there is a problem with any one of these structures, the arches may fall and the windows (i.e. shoulders, hips, ribs etc.) don’t function as well.

Your anatomical stirrup

There are two rather important muscles surrounding the foot that are intimately tied into the arch on the medial side. They wrap around the foot like the stirrup you would get into on a horse. In fact, they’re referred to as the “anatomical stirrup”. The two muscles are the tibialis anterior and the fibularis (peroneus) longus. The first of these two is the same muscle associated with shin splints and can be palpated quite easily. Find your shin bone (tibia) and move your finger over to the outside (lateral side) of the bone. Now, lift your foot from the ankle joint and you’ll feel the muscle beneath your fingers. You can also follow the muscle down and find a very thick tendon heading to the inside of your foot, right to the medial arch.

The second muscle is harder to find, so I’ll just describe it. It runs down the outside of your calf behind the bump on the outside (lateral side) of your ankle. It then runs under your foot from the lateral side, and finally heads across the bottom of your foot to meet up with tibialis anterior on the medial arch. These two muscles together become balancers of the foot. They affect the way your arch is either drawn up or falling down when standing. There are a myriad of muscles assisting in the arches but let’s just play with these for today.

Explore your foot foundation

Enough talk, let’s take it into practice. Stand in tadasana and become aware of where your weight is over your feet. What does your foot foundation feel like? Perhaps the weight is more in your heels or more on your toes. No need to judge where it is, just create some awareness. There are a number of ways to engage the arches and one way is to simply lift your toes. Another way that I like is to focus on is pressing the base of the big toe into the ground while also pushing down with the outer back heel. The sensation is almost like your foot is getting shorter between the base of your toes and your heel. While doing this, draw the awareness up the inside of the leg all the way up to the inside of your thighs and draw it up through the psoas.

Let’s look at warrior I for a moment. There are two feet on the ground, therefore two arches to be aware of. In the front foot we’re always told to have the knee over the ankle in warrior (great idea). But, let’s play for a moment with this instruction. Take your knee in slightly and carefully notice what happens to the arch in your front foot. Did you notice the arch collapsing? The back foot is a common place to find yourself with half a foot on the floor and it’s usually not the outside half. Play with the same instruction above for engaging the arch here. Press into the ball of the foot and the outer heel and watch your arches grow.