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12. Resonating Footwear

Your felt sense and connection to the ground, through your shoes, plays a major role in:

  • Your postural alignment
  • How you physically feel and move 
  • How you orient yourself upright against gravity and with what muscles
  • How you process and integrate information and communicate
  • Emotional regulation and feeling safe in your body

When you understand this, you recognize that footwear is pretty important. If your shoes are not supporting your physical neutrality and postural alignment, they do not deserve to contain your feet. Being contained in poor shoe patterns restricts you, limiting your ability and ease of resonating health. 

The intention of this information is to support you in finding and wearing footwear that provides the most optimal foot-ground connection bringing you into clearer introception, or internal felt sense.

 

Browse the following 3 options or use your testing technique to determine where you need to focus your attention to align with more centering footwear. 

 

Once you have reviewed 1 or more of the options above, you are now going to assess your shoes.

 

Assessment Instructions to Determine Optimal Footwear

  1. Determine your baseline status:
    1. While barefoot, walk for 30-60 seconds on a level surface to get a feel for how you move without shoes or sensory foot support on. Sometimes filming your walk can help you see a difference if feeling it is hard.
    2. While still barefoot, perform at least 2 lower body Physical Resonance Tests (toe touch, squat, kneeling or single leg balance) to get a baseline. Take note of your scores.
  2. Try one of your footwear options
    1. Walk for 30-60 seconds in that condition and do the same 2 Physical Resonance Tests to see if there is a difference. Film this walk as desired to compare with your barefoot walk.
  3. What the results mean:
    1. If either of your Physical Resonance Tests are worse it indicates that these shoes are not a good match for you.
    2. If either of your Physical Resonance Tests are better it indicates these shoes positively support your postural system.
    3. If either of your Physical Resonance Tests are not different it indicates that these shoes neither help nor hurt you.
    4. If one test was better and one was worse, add a third Physical Resonance Test and assess the walking videos to see how you are moving.
  4. Perform this for all the shoes you wish to test.
    • When a particular shoe is right for you, it should feel good. However, sometimes a new pattern can feel "different" or "weird" while still testing as beneficial for your body. Trust your physical tests. In these cases, you may need to gradually build up your tolerance to it using a wear schedule.

 

Integrate resonating footwear into your life within the next 3 weeks, if not sooner.

  • Discard of any shoes that negatively impacted your Physical Resonance Tests and walk. Don't keep them even as "junk shoes" for nasty chores. These shoes no longer serve you and the Physical Resonance Tests prove it.
  • You especially need to be in supportive footwear when doing chores that are moderate to heavy. If not, this is when injuries are more likely to happen. As Physical Therapists, we see many common but significant injuries happen doing odd jobs in poor footwear!
  • When you load your body in a poor postural pattern it is less able to handle what you are doing. If you are supported well, you have more power, strength and control of your body. So when performing something that challenges you, rather than risk an injury, appropriately support your feet which translates up through the rest of your postural system. Foundation is key!

 

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