Featuring Debra Treloar, BSR, FCAMPT Treloar Physiotherapy Vancouver BC
How Core Stability of the Ankle Is Gained Through Physiotherapy
Duration: 2 minutes, 30 seconds

Core stability is something that’s talked about in the trunk a lot, but people don’t think about core stability in all their peripheral joints, and the foot is the same as all the peripheral joints in that foot and ankle have small muscles around that give them stability.

And we lose the ability to use those for a number of reasons. You might have an injury or also a trauma to the foot, and the muscles won’t work as well. But one of the biggest reasons that we lose our ability to use our intrinsic muscles is because we wear shoes from the time we start walking right through the rest of our lives.

And when we wear shoes, we, our brain basically loses the image of having five toes. It’d be like putting gloves on your hands and then going through your whole life with a, with mitts, actually, so you had one thumb and one, basically your brain would see it as one finger.

So we do that to our feet, and because we are in shoes all the time, we lose the intrinsic function of the muscles in, in the foot. The intrinsic muscles of your feet, like all the core muscles, give stability to an area. So the small muscles in your feet give stability to the toes and to the joints of the ball of your feet, which are the beginning of the toes, really.

When those muscles work well, then the large muscles, the long muscles that come off of your calf and the front of your leg, can work the way that they’re supposed to. But when the little muscles in your feet don’t work well, we get muscle imbalances so that we get things like curled toes, we get claw toes, we see hallux valgus, different, different things happening with the toes because we have this imbalance.

A physiotherapist will give you exercises to, to do that will define the fact that you have five toes. We need that body scheme in our brains in order for those little muscles to work.

So he’ll give you exercises that will be specific for that plus start to build over top of that. So we build up the intrinsics and then we’ll build the long muscles over top of a stable foot.

Well, the feet are your base of support quite often. They’re your base of support certainly when you’re standing. But they’re also a base of support when you sit and when you go from sit to stand, you go through your feet.

And if they’re unstable, then the rest of your body is having to work extra hard to keep you upright in a vertical orientation, and to allow you to walk. So if we get these little muscles working and we become more efficient, then the entire body actually works more efficiently.

If you think you have a problem with your foot or your ankle, you need to see a physiotherapist. They’ll assess you, give you some exercises to do, and you’ll feel so much better after. Treloar Physiotherapy Vancouver BC

Presenter: Debra Treloar, Physiotherapist, Vancouver, BC

Local Practitioners: Physiotherapist