Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes

A few weeks ago I took a manual assessment and intervention course for knee, ankle, and foot restoration from the incomparable Dr. Locatelli Rao from Pasadena Physical Therapy. He opened the course with this axiom: “If there is any one event in a person's history of clinical significance of the highest degree that people will discount, disregard or forget about altogether, it's an ankle sprain.”

Most people will shrug off an ankle sprain and say, “I just rolled it" or "I've rolled it a thousand times” or, in terms of severity, "nothing to where I needed to see the doctor or use crutches." Anecdotally, I’ve heard this dozens of times from clients I work with. But when I watch them walk or lunge or squat or hop, their feet and ankles don’t move the way they’re meant to.

Why are ankle sprains a big deal? Why do they have implications for every joint higher up in the body? In Dr. Loc’s words: “If any part of your body doesn’t move, do any of the receptors in that part of the body get any input? If we cast your knee - could you train your hamstrings or quads?” The answer to both of these questions is no.

So, if parts of your feet don’t move the way they’re supposed to, the receptors in the tissues don’t receive input. That will change how you sense the ground through your feet and, in turn, change the information that is carried from your feet to brain; the brain will then make decisions about what happens at the lower legs, knees, upper legs, pelvis, ribcage, shoulder blades, and neck based on faulty information. All of these parts rely on your feet’s ability to correctly interpret signals from the ground, step after step.

Over the course of the seminar, I watched how Dr. Loc’s interventions at our human case study’s feet, ankles, and knees reshaped how this person walked, from how they used their feet all the way up to how their shoulder blades moved and how they swung their arms. The transformation was dramatic.

I’ll end with this final golden nugget from Dr. Loc, a reminder of our essential human design and what it was made to do: “Birds fly. Fish swim. Humans walk.”