Italy is a beautiful country… just incredibly scenic. But it may have even more going for it than great food, rich history and stunning landscapes.
My feet are feeling alive in a way that they rarely get to experience in my day-to-day at home.
These are the kinds of streets we’ve been walking down…
What do you notice about the surfaces underfoot in these pictures?
I feel like I’ve hardly set foot on a flat surface since we arrived here. Every street and footpath has been textured.
I’m sure it’s not like that everywhere in the country… I realise that we’ve been visiting typical tourist locations. But even in the heart of cities like Milan, Verona, Venice and Florence, nothing has been truly flat. Even the paved areas that may have started as smooth stone have been worn into various textures by centuries of constant traffic.
These are some of the varying textures we’ve been walking on…
(I’ve definitely received a few strange looks as I’ve been taking these pictures of the ground while everyone around me is looking up at the amazing architecture and monuments!)
As you know, I’m always talking about the Stimulation vs Support paradigm and how important it is for our brain to receive sufficient sensory input from our feet. It’s one thing to understand that in theory, but a whole different experience to physically feel it with every step.
Many of the cobblestone surfaces we’ve been walking on are so irregular that their texture is obvious even through my thongs (flip flops.)
My feet definitely feel like they’ve had a workout by the end of the day… especially the plantar intrinsic muscles and the muscles in my lower legs.
The other interesting area of awareness in my body is my deep hip stabilisers. I can really feel them constantly working, in a way that I haven’t consciously noticed before. Much of the ground we’ve been walking on is significantly uneven, requiring quick moment-to-moment adjustments to avoid twisting an ankle.
And despite what I said earlier about taking photos of the ground, the reality is that most of the time I’m actually looking up taking in the scenes around me- everywhere you look is like a postcard.
Which means the sensory and motor apparatus of my foot-brain-body connection is performing exactly as it should- largely unconsciously and reflexively. I think years of wearing BBOs and barefoot shoes has allowed that system to develop in a way that many modern humans don’t experience.
I actually wonder how common tourist ankle sprains are here!
It makes me realise just how sensorily-deprived we are through under-stimulation of the Foot-Brain Connection that we evolved with. After all, I’m still wearing shoes and walking on man-made surfaces rather than barefoot on grass, dirt and rocks.
Although my feet are getting more input than usual, it’s still a tiny fraction of the amount that our brains received almost every minute of the day for thousands of generations.
When I first started exploring these ideas, I thought shoes were the real culprit. And they definitely are a big factor. But they’re not the whole story.
These days I actually think the flat, featureless surfaces we typically walk on are an even bigger factor.
This first became clear to me one day when I noticed my son’s posture.
He has literally never worn a regular shoe in his life. From day one he’s worn only barefoot shoes.
(Both my boys totally refuse to even wear socks! Much to the dismay of their mum and class teachers. The other day Caelan said with a totally straight face… “Mum, I’d rather die than wear socks!)
Yet what I observed was that he had the exact posture that I have come to think of as the classic “dysfunctional feet posture…”
Anterior pelvic translation, forward head posture and slumped shoulders.
That was when I realised that no matter how much attention we paid to his footwear, we had much less control over the surfaces he regularly walked on.
As you can see from these images, things changed quickly when he started wearing Better Balance Orthotics. This change occurred over 3 months of wearing them.
You can also see that his scapula heights evened out as well. He was a pre-teen when this photo was taken, and we know that the early teen years are the most common time for scoliosis development.
Although we now prescribe BBO as an antidote to the sensory deprivation of shoes and flat surfaces, they were originally developed as an approach for helping scoliosis.
Looking at the photo above, I think this was a scoliosis just waiting to develop.
And all of this despite having never worn anything but barefoot shoes his whole life!
I still think barefoot shoes are a good idea- they allow more natural movement of the foot, and their thin soles do allow greater sensory input from the ground. They’re just not enough on their own to combat the unnatural environment that our feet operate in these days.
It’s been interesting the last couple of days… we’ve been looking for a pair of sandals for Harry. It’s just too hot to wear shoes every day! As it turns out, there apparently isn’t a sandal wide enough for his foot in all of Italy!
A lifetime of wearing shoes and BBOs have created structurally different feet.
Having spent most of the day walking almost every day for the last week, it’s been interesting to compare the days when I’ve worn my BBO in barefoot shoes vs the days wearing thongs. There’s definitely an obvious difference in my levels of fatigue and general minor aches, not just in my feet but in my whole body!
Even with the increased stimulation from the cobblestones we’ve been walking on, the orthotics still make a clear and noticeable difference.
But each day has been an internal battle getting ready to go out… I know I’ll feel better wearing my orthotics, but it’s just been incredibly hot here. Even for an Aussie!
I think what’s really unique about BBO is that they work on both a sensory and a motor level. They stimulate both mechanoreceptors and proprioceptors. Both of these separate-but-linked streams of information are required by our brain for proper balance, posture and movement patterns.
I’m aware of some other products that increase sensory stimulation through a specific texture that has been shown to increase nerve activation. This is a great idea, and way better than doing nothing for your feet, but it’s still only part of the equation.
It’s stimulating the mechanoreceptors- the Merkel discs, Ruffini endings, Meisner corpuscles and Pacinian corpuscles.
But it’s not directly stimulating the proprioceptors – the Muscle spindles and Golgi tendon organs. These only fire when a muscle or tendon lengthens.
BBO due to their springy pockets, actively “poke” up into the muscle bellies of the foot with every step, activating these proprioceptors. And it’s not just a static force like an arch support. It’s a dynamic, variable stimulation.
I haven’t found anything else that seems to stimulate both aspects of our neurology in the same way.
My experience of testing these products using the functional assessments we use for BBO is that I haven’t found them to have the same effect. Although they help, they don’t produce the same immediate, global changes.
I was excited when I came across a huge Nike store in Florence… I though I was finally going to get my hands on some of the Nike Mind shoes that came out earlier this year (they haven’t made it to Australia yet.)
They’re based on the same underlying sensory stimulation paradigm as BBO, with bumps in the soles designed to stimulate the feet, although in a much more generic and less-targeted way than our orthotics.
I’ve been looking forward to running them through our testing process. But unfortunately, they were nowhere to be found in this huge, 3-level megastore. In checking later, I discovered they are also unavailable online.
I’m not sure if this means they have been incredibly successful… or incredibly unsuccessful!
I guess time will tell.
I’ll let you know the outcome of my testing if and when I get my hands on a pair.
That’s all for this week… we’ve just a arrived in the beautiful, secluded villa in Tuscany where we will be spending the next 3 days attending the UAC family event.
Here’s the views from our window…
It’s simply stunning.
And the boys are waiting for me to jump in the pool with them. Sometimes it’s a tough job being a Dad!
Have a great week.
Cheers,
PS. If you’re not lucky enough to be walking in such a sensorily-rich environment as Italy, your feet and brain are definitely missing out. This experience has convinced me now more than ever that Better Balance Orthotics are the best available strategy for filling the gap between the environment we were designed for, and the one that most of us (including all your patients) actually live in.