DRMacIver's Notebook
Learning to walk right
Learning to walk right
Of the back of my realisation that I was standing on one leg wrong I had another important insight of this type: I was walking wrong, and I could just walk right instead..
It’s a longstanding problem of mine that I have flat feet, and this causes a lot of problems for my legs, especially my right leg. This causes my knees to bow inwards and generally seems to underly a lot of my general physical problems.
During a walk the other day after I figured out the standing on one leg thing, I had an important insight: I could just walk differently.
Here’s what I said on discord at the time:
I have a longstanding problem with flat feet. Major issue, arguably my most basic one that creates all my other body issues
I’ve tried a bunch of things to fix this (albeit not very diligently) and nothing seems to have helped
And I’ve just figured out the solution and it’s so fucking annoying
Which is to pay attention to my feet while I’m walking and stop walking with them flat
And to be clear this is much harder. It feels difficult and unnatural. But I think that’s actually a sign that it’s working for building muscles I’ve neglected
(In answer to a question about how) To a large degree arch is a thing you do not a thing you have. But more specifically I guess: roll your feet outwards so that more or the weight is on the outside of the foot
Like a lot of “flat feet” is really about letting what arch there is collapse inwards
I also wear barefoot shoes and have been puzzled at how little they helped, and I think the reason is that they’re a bottleneck on fixing the habit of walking wrong but removing that bottleneck doesn’t cause the habit to fix itself.
I think I’ve been working on a wrong implicit model where I’ve treated physical problems as things that will fix themselves if you work on the necessary muscles and stop doing the thing that creates the problem, but the correct model is maybe more like “make sure you’re using the right muscles and motions and that will strengthen the muscles you need for doing it right directly”
Anyway I’ve been practicing this exercise on and off for a few days and… turns out this is wrong.
I’d started to have suspicions this morning when I tried practicing the position when standing in the shower, and noticed how much it scrunched my toes up. That’s very much not the toe position of a healthy walk.
Then I went to my one on one Pilates session and asked to go off script and basically just focus on gait and leg exercises.This isn’t really a pilates thing, I’m just relying on my teacher’s broader expertise in body mechanics.. We concluded that basically this was just walking differently wrong, wasn’t actually exercising the right muscles, and probably was bad for my hips.
I do think that the core insight that you can just walk differently is good and I will be drawing on it, but I think probably (as various people pointed out to me on discord) it’s never going to be quite this easy. If you’re walking wrong you probably need to put in some active effort into learning what walking right looks like, and yes developing the muscles in question with some more basic movements, rather than just lifting up your arches and expecting the problem to be solved.