Find Your Core... Through Your Feet!
1) Take off your shoes.
My mentor MJ always called shoes "sensory deprivation chambers." This is so true - just think of what your poor bones look like jammed into a narrow shoe, or worse, a shoe with a heel on it! Your feet are LOADED with proprioceptors, you can think of these nerve endings as little messengers telling your body where it is in space, and also what muscles to use to stay upright. Cramming our bones into shoes, or lifting our heels messes with what messages are sent to our muscles in our core. Getting barefoot allows the messengers to activate our core.
2) Balance your weight equally on your feet.
Stand barefoot on a level surface and look straight ahead. Do a mental scan of your body - do any joints feel locked? does any body part feel checked out? is anything twitching? Now intentionally melt the soles of your feet as equally as possible across all four corners of your feet (big toe/second toe joint, pinky toe, inner heel and outer heel). Balancing out where we load our weight onto our feet will give our core the wake up call to keep us standing tall.
3) Test your squats.
Do you feel gripping on the top side of your feet and ankles when you squat? This is a function of your weight not being equally balanced across the soles of your feet. Stand with your feet 4" apart and lower into a squat. (hips hinged back, torso forward, neutral spine, and knees just in front of the ankles). Look down and see if the tops of your feet have tendons popping up. Inhale, and in your mind shift more weight into your heels. Keep weight in the balls of feet and big toe/second toe but let your heels fire up your gluts - which in turn will activate your core working with your gluts for a full body experience!
4) Roll it out.
Our feet can hold a lot of tension in them - they do so much getting us through each day! Spend 3 min with a tennis ball and your whole body, not only your foot - core connection will benefit.
-place tennis ball below big toe / second toe join, keep heel down and breathe
-roll tennis ball side to side under the ball of foot, hold it under the pink toe
-roll tennis ball along outer foot, hold under outer heel and breathe
-roll tennis ball under heel to inner heel, hold and breathe
-roll tennis ball under the whole foot to massage and open space for your bones
*pause standing 4" apart with bare feet and see how grounded that foot feels vs the one we haven't rolled yet!
Repeat on the other foot. Each step should take approx. 15-20 seconds.