I read an article some time ago which said that every email you send or receive routes its way through one of maybe a half-dozen clearing-houses in North America.  There, text of the email--in the form of electrons or pixels or small woodland creatures, for all I know--travels through a shoebox-sized device and then out to its destination.  You know all those letters and numbers and weird symbols that pop up in those "MAILER-DAEMON" things you get that tell you about an undeliverable message?  Those are a record of all the places your email went before it bounced back to you; inevitably one or more of these is a major clearing-house. 

I'm surely getting some numbers wrong here, because it's been a long time and I'm not up for researching today, but the point is that all ka-jillion emails that get sent out from all ka-jillion-and-one sources in the US actually hub through just a handful of places before reaching their destination.  It's rather like an airport:  fly from Valpariso, Indiana to Brunswick, Maine, and you can't just take the Valpariso-Brunswick Canal, much as the great frontiersman Johnny Canal would have liked.  No, you've got to go through O'Hare and JFK. 

Your feet are those little shoebox-sized super-intersections.  They're the O'Hares and JFK's of the fitness world.  Practically every movement you make starts with the feet.  And by "starts with," I mean, the feet have to gather information from the ground and then move based on that information; the impulse travels up through your body to your hand or head or wherever your movement terminates, and you score a goal, or you don't.  You maintain you balance as you get out of the chair, or you don't.  You win the gold in the Olympic 100-meter finals, or you don't. 

(Great athletic performances start on the ground.) 

Your feet, then, are pretty darn important:  they're like antennae, constantly taking in data about the world and your location in it:  what's the gradient of the ground I'm standing on?  What's its texture?  How slippery is it?  What's its temperature?  Where's my weight?  What direction am I moving?  Could I move forward, backwards, to the side, jump up or down?  A wealth of information is continuously available through the feet if we can only learn to take it in.

And yet:  I have yet to see a fitness program that pays much attention to the feet. You can't really work them like the big  muscle, groups, after all; you don't do toe curls and extensions with weights; the feet don't hypertrophy, and even if they did, they'd look weird as hell, so why spend the time?  Moreover, our feet are almost always trapped in shoes designed to "support" our feet.  How effective would our hands be if we always wore mittens with a slab of hard rubber on the palms and fingers? 

Hint:  not very. If your feet aren't "tuned up," then they aren't taking in data from the ground effectively.  It's as if one of those email super-intersection thingies is busted, and nothing's getting through.  

I've been working with a sports-performance client named Mike lately who's an avid golfer.  I've never played a round of golf in my life, and know next to nothing about the mechanics of a swing, but I know that body awareness is a major key to any athletic move, and that most people who spend their life in shoes--meaning, pretty much everybody--lack sufficient control and awareness in their feet.  So I've been working on his feet. 

This morning he told me he'd felt a new connection to the ground in his most recent game; he felt like he could sense the ground with his toes as he walked and set up for his swing; and, before he was called away by work duties on the 14th hole, was on his way to shooting in the low 80's--a good seven-to-ten stroke improvement over his usual score. 

Now:  Mike takes his golf seriously, works hard at it, and has had a lesson or two from a high-level pro lately, so I certainly can't credit the handful of toe-exercises we've been doing lately for the jump in his game-play.  But the fact that Mike noticed the new sensitivity and awareness in his feet even in the midst of his personal-best golf round suggests that it was at least a part of the picture. 

So:  over the next few days, go barefoot when you're indoors.  Sitting down or standing up, fan the toes out, press them, one by one, into the floor.  Curl them into the sole of the foot, then lift them back towards you shin.  Work with the ankle as well, finding different ways in which the toes can move in relation to the ankle:  ankle flexed, toes up and down; ankle extended, toes up and down.  Rock the feet side to side on the ground.  Stand on one foot and circle the hips, feeling your weight on different parts of your feet.  Try to achieve something like the kind of control you have over your hands, meaning that you can move quickly or slowly, lightly or heavily.  Practice subtle and small foot movement, not just large, gross motor patterns. 

Because most of us have very little control or awareness of our feet, it doesn't take much to improve, so you won't need to spend hours on this kind of exercise.  See what happens and report back.

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