Your hips affect your feet
Are your flat feet coming from your hip joints?
Yes, you read that correctly – your flat feet could actually be due to weak or underused muscles in your buttocks that help to orientate your hip joints properly.
The muscles described above are called your gemellus superior muscles, and are located deep in your buttocks, attaching your pelvis to your femur (the bone in your thigh).
When your gemellus muscles aren’t doing their job, your femurs can slightly rotate inwards, which creates a lot more downward pressure through the inside of your knee and foot. This can cause knee pain, ankle pain or flat feet, or even all of those problems at once.
This problem may be more common in people who work at a desk, because when you sit down a lot, the muscles in your buttocks don’t have to do much work and can switch off, while the type of chair you’re sitting in can also encourage that rotation of the femurs too. Sitting with one leg crossed over the other can also create this pattern of hip rotation. However, it is not only desk workers who get this problem, it can be anyone, even if you’re relatively fit.
Treatment
Your Osteopath can assess you to see if the arches of your foot look like they’re under too much pressure, check the activation of your muscles, give you exercises to encourage the activation of your gemellus muscles, and give you other advice. When I assess a patient before every treatment, I look at their hips and pelvis, and see where the weightbearing is being loaded through the knees.
Osteopathic treatment may consist of some soft tissue massage, joint stretching and movement, and muscle activation techniques to get your hips and pelvis working together properly to allow proper weight distribution down your legs, taking pressure away from the inside and putting it more towards the outside of your feet when you stand and walk.
It’s a good idea to get your shoes regularly updated. If there’s a pair of shoes that you wear every day, and walk decent distances in, they should be changed every 6-8 months. For shoes you wear less regularly, once a year or even longer should be fine. Running shoes should be refreshed every 6 months for regular runners, and yearly for less frequent or short distance runners. Poor support in the foot arch can lead to problems in the hips and back, so it’s extra important for people who regularly walk or run, to keep their footwear up to date.
I often treat people who have tried to get back into exercise using an older pair of shoes, causing their hips to rotate inwards, the foot arch to drop, and back pain, pelvic floor issues or even neck pain to develop.
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