Foot Fitness

Jenna Zaffino:
Hi, everyone. I'm Jenna. Welcome to your foot care class. This is a class that's going to give you a few things that you can do every single day to help you get up and go or simply bring some more awareness and care to your feet themselves. I have a few tools we'll use today. 1 is a tennis ball or any kind of ball that has just not too much give in it, so we can work on a little lovely foot massage. I also have a TheraBand, which is just an elastic band that you might find at a physical therapist's office. If you don't have one of these, a towel will suffice, or a bathrobe tie, a belt, a yoga strap.

Anything that you have that's long enough to wrap around your foot and hold on to is gonna be perfect. We'll put those over to the side. And I just brought this stretch out strap, which just has a few different options to place your foot that might be something that you are interested in looking into. I like to use it for my stretches, so maybe you will too. I'll show you that in just a moment. And lastly, I have a little fishbowl full of fun, colorful things that we're going to pick up with our feet or try to pick up with our feet. Don't worry if you don't have one of these. I'll give you some suggestions for alternatives when we get to this part.

To begin, we'll do this class in a seated position to just help us focus on our feet and relax, but I would like to encourage you to sit upright with a good deal of awareness about your posture so that we can be breathing easily as we treat our feet. Let's begin with our ball. We're going to place it under the foot. We'll start on one side or the other and just start to roll back and forth. Now the purpose of this gentle little massage type action is to really bring some awareness to the bottom of your foot. If you find that you discover a tight place, you might wanna put a little more pressure into it, but there's no need to do anything that causes or enhances discomfort in your foot. This should feel good, like the idea of a foot rub. We're starting just to move kind of from the outside of the arch over to the inside of the arch.

I tend to do these pretty quickly. You can choose whatever cadence works for you. Once you've spent a little time rolling out the bottom of your foot, we're going to stop with the ball right underneath the ball of your foot. I'd like you to lift your toes up. Spread them as much as possible. And then wrap them around as if you were going to grab the ball and pick it up off the floor. So just lift and wrap. Lift and wrap.

We're starting to warm up all of the knuckles of our feet and our toes themselves. Now, if you get really good at the lift and wrap, you can start to play with some piano toes, so lifting them all and going from the pinkie out to the big toe. Or lifting them all and going from the big toe down to the pinky, which for me is not quite there. Not quite as easy. The goal is to create a sense of doming around your foot. So, really articulating through that arch. Once we've done that one, we'll go ahead and place the ball underneath our heel, and then take your hands onto your shoulders. We're going to hinge forward in the flat back that we've used in our exercise classes just to put some weight down into the heel and then release to take weight out of the ball.

So almost like you're pressing down onto a pedal or a button, something that you can really shift your weight into. I like to do this one because it brings a bit of awareness into my heel. I have a very high arch in my foot, so sometimes I tend to walk on my toes a little more. And this is a nice way to just create awareness. Now if you do have tighter feet or you're working with anything like plantar fasciitis, sometimes it can be helpful to move the ball a little closer to the edge of your heel where your heel meets the arch of your foot and give a little massage there sometimes. Again, the objective is to stay out of pain and discomfort. We're not looking for those things to happen. Everything should feel good.

Excellent. Alright. You can spend as much time as you want on one foot. We're gonna switch to the other foot just for the sake of our time today, and start again with our rolling. Now, for me on this foot, I have a little bit of an injury that I'm working with, so I'm just going with a lighter touch. I'm shifting my weight a little bit more to my standing supporting leg, And then just easily going back and forth, not trying to create too much friction or tension or anything that doesn't feel good. Sometimes when I'm working with my clients that have some chronic pain, I'll encourage them to kind of tiptoe up to the edge of the pain. Like, know where it is.

Get to know it. Like, look at it from afar, but know where the boundary between staying out of pain and going into pain is. Stay on the side of the fence that is safe, that is free of discomfort, and maybe over time we can widen that fence a little bit to move deeper, let's say. Let's take the ball of the foot and start to wrap our toes over again. So, lifting up, spreading, and wrapping. A lot of times the conversation around pain involves warrior and conquering and battling and all of these things. And sometimes, as a person who does live with chronic pain, what I've learned is sometimes partnership is a strategy that can actually help us move with pain in a more easy, I wanna use the word harmonious way. If you live with chronic pain, you'll understand that it doesn't feel harmonious, but sometimes bringing that intention to the table can be helpful.

Alright. Let's place our heel onto the ball. We're gonna take our hands to the shoulders again. Hinge and push. And come back up. Hinge and push, whee, and come back up. Good. If you can see this ball, you might notice I have lots of different shapes painted on it, with a, or written on it with a Sharpie.

The work that we do in your self inquiry and your mindful compass library with the bigger balls, the letter balls, can be translated definitely onto a smaller ball, just by writing some letters and numbers and doing those same exercises. So, if you haven't seen any of those in the other libraries, I encourage you to check them out. Alright. We're finished with our tennis ball and our foot massage for now. Remember, you can always go back to it. I'm gonna bring the towel and the TheraBand, and just go a little bit on the diagonal. We're gonna work with the repetition range of between 10 20. For our purposes today, we'll just do 10 repetitions.

So I'm either going to have my foot wrapped around the band with a little tension like so, and then as I push through, I'm gonna push the ball of the foot and then the toes and then the toes and the ball of the foot. Keeping my heel grounded, I touch the ball of my feet. I press my toes down against. I lift my toes and come up. So we'll just do 10 of these now. In the event that the band feels like it's far too much for you today, like your toes are really resistant and fighting against it, then I do wanna encourage you to just do the same action without the band at all. So that band can be very, very helpful in helping you strengthen the muscles of your feet. But as with all pieces of resistance equipment, even the TheraBand, if it is inhibiting or standing in the way of our ability to do the motion, then we can pretty much glean that it's not helpful to us right now.

So, if you can't do the exercise with the resistance, it's perfectly reasonable to take the resistance away. Alright. That was about 10. And just for the sake of comparison, I'll show you what we might do with the towel here. So, we'll just wrap it around the foot in the same way. Give it a pull. You would just have to give yourself a little more. You press.

Press the towel down. You just keep the towel taught with your hands, and work with the same amount of resistance. It's just a little less elastic for you. So, let's go to the other side. Taking that TheraBand once again. Pushing down. Pushing the toes. Trying to separate that ball of the foot and the toes can be the biggest challenge for most of us.

It's like a slow motion toe tap, yeah? But in doing this against the resistance, we're really working well on the dexterity of our feet, the way in which we're working our feet against resistance. And I hope you'll notice after doing these exercises that when you get up and walk around, it's a very different experience when you have feet that feel awake versus when you have feet that feel like they're just kinda 2 blocks of bone. Last one. Alright. So, with this, strap, if you do have a loop or an elastic resistance loop, you can work some dual feet exercise. We can put the feet in both sides of the strap, we would lift the toes up, and we would push the feet apart, bring them to center, and pull them down. Now, half the battle, and you're seeing my weakness here, is bringing them back to center with control so hard and putting them down. So we lift them up.

We push them apart. Keeping your heel onto the mat. Bring them back with control. And press them down. Lift. Press them apart. Bring them back with control. And down.

And, again, for your repetitions, we're thinking 10 to 20 for maintenance. 30 for strength, and if you need to, you can go 3 sets up 10. But there's no medal for doing more. It's just what you can tolerate, what feels good, what feels like it's creating a better situation for your feet overall. Good. Okay. So that's our 10 outside. Let's work on inside pulling.

So for this one, we can just simply take our foot across. So, I've got the band. I'm gonna lift the foot up. I'm gonna swing it in and release. Swing it in and release. So, my legs crossed, and I'm just doing my foot exercises. You can do every single one of these exercises without a resistance band. It'll work beautifully just to get that mobility.

If you do find yourself sitting for long periods of time during the day, don't forget to move your feet under your desk. Good. Last one, and then we'll switch sides. So I'm sticking with 10 today. In my rehab program, I have a little bit more, time allocated, and so I'll spend a little more time doing these exercises. So we flex the foot up, and then we pull and release. Now, who has time to do foot exercises? Am I right? Well, I never thought I did until I injured my foot and it became necessary. Here's my little trick.

I keep most of these things in my bathroom because I know that I will be there for a period of time every morning. Whether it's first thing in the morning, brushing my teeth, putting my makeup on, doing all the things that you do in your bathroom, if you just put little foot toys in various places, you're more likely to do your exercises, which helps you overall. Alright. Let's release. Okay. So, now comes to our stretch. The towel will work great for this, a yoga strap again. For our stretch, we're gonna take my strap and place it over the ball of the foot.

We wanna get to the edge of the chair if we're seated in a way that allows us to really stretch the leg or straighten it as much as possible. We're gonna sit up nice and tall and pull the toes back with the strap. So pull the foot back with the strap. So we've already got a calf stretch here. And then we're gonna hinge forward with a flat back to reach long into that stretch, holding it for 10 seconds. And then release and reconnect. So, we pull the toes back, sit tall, lean forward, and try to maintain the tension. Now, I will say that this stretch for me does fall into the discomfort category, but not the pain injury category.

So, go into a place where you're challenging the tissue in your calf and your foot to lengthen, but not so much that you feel emotional about it. We wanna feel like we're doing something for our foot, versus not. So let's go to the other side. Again, for these, I would say 10 stretches is a really good, number to shoot for. So pull the toes back, and then hinge forward. A lot of times when we go into this stretch, we'll hinge forward and then relax the foot away. Make sure you're still pulling those toes back to you. So maybe 10 stretches for about 10 seconds at a time.

That's gonna give you a good amount of time to stay in the stretch, a good amount of repetitions. If you are somebody who struggles with any inflammation or any fasciitis or tendinitis on the bottoms of your feet, the first thing is always to check-in with your health care provider on those things. Please don't wait. I've been there. It's not worth it. But if you're managing your care, adding these stretches into your daily routine can be a game changer for getting back into a full mobile situation with your feet. Alright. Now comes our last piece, the fun.

So these are called toe bows, and they are a means of challenging our foot to pick something up. So we're gonna be working on dexterity, and I just like to layer them all out in front, spreading them out. Some of them are coming untied. If you don't have lots of little pieces of tubing hanging around in your house, and why would you? I wanna encourage you to use something else. You can use hair ties, you could use, little Legos. Those are always seem to be hanging around whether or not you have children. There are Legos everywhere, it feels. They you could use matchbox cars or pom poms, or you could even use, like, some penne pasta.

I just would not advise eating that pasta after you're done with your foot exercise. Keep that one separate. Alright? So let's go ahead, and what you're gonna do is grab a bow with your foot, and do the best you can to drop it in the bucket. If you get really good at this, you can definitely time yourself. You can work for your own record. But for the time being, it's just about working the muscles of your feet in such a way that they are able to grab. Now, are we grabbing while we walk? Sometimes. Depending on what we're walking on.

Did I get everything? We're gonna go for the big 3 at the end. 2 and 1. Once you've done one side you can switch to the other. These exercises that are challenging you to challenging you to grab and pick up are working your intrinsic foot muscles. And what those do for you is they help you navigate over uneven or new surfaces. They definitely help you with balance, figuring out how to add support to your toes. They absolutely help you with standing and walking, and they even can sometimes help with building speed in your steps, if that's something that's important to you. Last one.

All right. So, the last piece that we'll do is just lifting and lowering your heels. So, rising up and lowering down. A calf raise, if you will. You can absolutely do this one standing. But if you are working in a seated position for your exercise classes, it's a great idea to have just a dumbbell. All the toys in the studio. And you can add a little weight here to just build up the strength, especially if you have any irritation standing and doing these.

Just some great ankle exercises. You can start with the dumbbell over 2 legs, holding onto it. You can progress doing single legs, just kinda keeping it balanced there, adding a little more weight for that foot to work with. There's a lot of different options that you can do. So, this week, for your weaving well-being tip, I'd like to challenge you to choose a stretch, a mobility, or a strengthening exercise. We had our ball rolling. We had our TheraBand or towel exercise. We had our stretch.

We had our inward and outward movement of the foot. And then we had our picking things up off the floor. Choose one of those. Maybe put something in your bath room area where you'll remember to do it and try it this week. Again, building a habit requires a plan. And so if you have a plan in place where you are going to see something that will cue you to do the exercise or do the stretch, you're going to be more likely to do it regularly. So, do yourself a favor. Set yourself up for success.

Thank you for joining me for this foot care session. And remember, you are strong, resilient, and the small moments and the small body parts do matter. I'll see you next time.