What’s up folks? Patrick Lerouge here from Evolve Restorative Therapy. You can find me at LivePainFreeProcess.com. I’m here to help you communicate with your body so you can eliminate pain physically, mentally and emotionally, folks. We have to get our body and our mind together so they start chatting, and that’s what we’re here about.

So we’re going to do a physical topic this week. Our physical topic is all about our first foundation: feet. Our feet are our first foundation to the world. That’s how our body knows what’s happening.

But a lot of people don’t understand that our feet are a proprioceptive device. That means it gets all its knowledge by feel; it’s a touch thing. And the fact that we have these sneakers that are thick – they have those thick soles, that don’t really move – that doesn’t do anything.

Your feet naturally fall asleep. So with your foot falling asleep all the time because we are always wearing shoes, because that’s our society; our foot never really talks and communicates with our body until two or three steps in to a movement. That’s when your body says, “Oh wait. We’re moving, lets do this.” It normally cranks at something else, being your lower back, your knee, your shoulder, anything like that. It’s going to try to pick you up at all cost, using whatever it has available to it, on the second or third step.

That’s why so many people say, “I hurt myself as I was getting up out of a chair.” This happens because your body didn’t say, “Oh wait. The foot’s moving. Something’s happening. let’s turn on this muscle, this muscle, this muscle.” It waited until its first step and you are already bent over, so what it had to do on that first step is say, “Oh my God I am falling forward. Let’s use whatever we have,” which is going to be your low back. That’s where it’s going to get cramped because your quads are going to work and, click, it goes through.

We need to get access to our feet, but yet still, we have to wear shoes.

How do we do that? You try to be barefoot as much as possible, utilize what’s going on inside the foot. We teach this in the program. One of our first foundations and the first steps that we’re going to be doing, is getting your feet to work.

But a trick that you can do to get your foot to become a little bit more sensitive, is use a pumice stone. There’s different types of pumice stones, there’s the lava rock for example. That’s the big brick, and that’s just really, really hard and it’ll start to get a lot of dead skin out of the way. The dead skin is there because your foot is trying to protect itself, because it is being pummeled all the time. We have to get you to learn how to get that thickness away, so your body can feel. By using a pumice stone, you can actually clean up a lot of that dead skin, and a lot of the– the miscommunication that happens there, is something that’s very ,very important to get rid of.

So, using a pumice stone — there are these rounded ones. There are these brick ones, like the lava stones. Either or, they all work; but I want you not to think of it as a beauty thing. I want you to think of it like this: “Oh, my feet need to talk some more. They need to feel the ground more. They need to feel through the sneaker, through the shoe, through the sandal. They need to learn how to feel again.”

Remember, I use those words very carefully right there. Your feet need to learn how to feel again, because they have been asleep for so long. You have to start waking them up by doing things muscular, as well as getting the skin to start talking with the ground. Feel what’s going on and then your body is going to start responding better and better.

After you pumice, your first step down out of the tub, you’re going to feel so much more of that tub, that shower. You’ll feel so much more and that’s what your body needs to know — “oh wait I’m moving” or “wait this is happening,” or “oh wait, my ankle’s at this angle; I need to turn on these muscles, so straighten out my ankle so I don’t roll, so I don’t break something.”

This is your first attempt at gaining access to the world. Remember that. Your foot is your first access to the world. You need to keep it somewhat active all the time, even though we wear shoes, sneakers, and things like that.

Then, try to get to a minimalist place. We’re not talking about the whole minimalism lifestyle now, but we are getting you to be aware of how thicker the shoes are now — these highly orthotic padded shoes! I saw a commercial for memory foam in your shoe. All memory foam is, is it just takes away the pressure. Your body needs that pressure. It needs that feedback or else it’s just going to roll. You’ll hear a lot of people rolling their ankles with the bigger shoes. That’s what just is.

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Until next time folks. Bye.