Foot problems have become more common than ever.
Given our sedentary lifestyle, we don’t use our feet a lot and when we do, given the sudden additional pressure, our feet succumb to injuries and chronic pains.
Some of the common causes of pain being plantar fasciitis, bunions, or simple long term chronic ankle pain.
Dealing with long term pain can be physically and even psychologically daunting. It affects a person’s quality of life and limits their ability to play sports, or even perform day to day tasks with confidence.
And then there is only one way out, pain management, so we turn to custom gel and cushion insoles for our shoes that take away some load from our feet.
Is this the solution really? Let’s break it down.
Insoles are nothing but cushions for your feet. They aim to support your weak muscles preventing them from overwork.
If I had to give an analogy, it is like getting a plaster after breaking a bone.
The pain goes away, because there is no motion.
But you won’t wear the cast forever, would you?
You see, if you spend too much time in this cast, all you do is make your muscles weaker.
Yes, the bone heals, but what do you do after? You get rid of the cast and slowly develop strength back into your arm.
As the saying goes - if you don’t use it, you lose it.
Same goes for the muscles in our feet.
When we use gel pads under our arch, or we add heel support to mitigate pain, we limit our ability to flex and relax our muscles how we would naturally.
The loss of this ability means our muscles practically don’t work, and when they don’t work, they get weaker and weaker, creating a permanent loop of dependency on these insoles.
The only true solution to a pain free life is not to outsource your work to a piece of plastic, but to develop your muscles to match up to your level of work.
We develop pain when we push our muscles beyond their capacity.
There are two ways to solve for this -
Reduce our expectations from them and live a sedentary lifestyle, or train and develop them to perform.
If you are someone who has gotten pulled into “now you will have to wear insoles forever” leave your email ID below and we will send you a program you can follow that will help you build your pain free ability and reclaim your life.
Disclaimer - It will take time. There will be some soreness initially, but that is what progress feels like.
Happy recovery.
