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take care of the boy from story who was put in water as a baby by Vincent H. '23

i am back to talk about moving the body again

two years ago i wrote about how to walk in the best way. but i forgot to think about something important: the type and form of the foot. now i have lived longer, so i know more about the best way to walk, and i will tell you about it today

a few months ago i had a problem. the problem was about the boy from story who was put in water as a baby:

diagram showing the foot and achilles tendon

the good news is: the boy did not break (in fact it was not close to breaking either. i am just saying this because i do not want anyone to worry). however, the boy started feeling bad. it was tired from working too hard. part of this was because i was not walking in the best way, for several reasons

the first reason is something i wrote about last time. last time i said that each time you walk, you should put the back of the foot down first and roll over to the front of the foot. this is still true (for most people at least, now that i am old i realize body facts are never true for everyone). however, it is easy to do this wrong. it is easy to hit the ground too hard with the back of the foot, and if you do this many times a day for many days the back of the foot and the lower leg will wear down over time. the key is that when you hit the ground with the back of the foot, there should be very little heavy stuff on the back of the foot. you should wait for the rest of the foot to hit the ground before moving the heavy stuff over. if you do this well the foot does a very good rolling move that is not too heavy for the back of the foot

diagram showing heel to toe motion for walking

the next thing to look at is the type of the foot. if you look very hard at the picture above, you see that the bottom of the foot is not straight. this is important. straight bottom of the foot is not good. you can see in the next picture that if the bottom of the foot is too straight or too far from straight, it makes the lower leg lean a little

diagram showing how flat or very curved feet put pressure on the ankle

straight bottom of foot can be so bad that some people (but not that many, please do not worry about this if you do not have foot problems) need to wear shoes that help the foot be less straight, that way they avoid getting more heavy stuff on the lower leg, and the boy from story who was put in water as a baby can be less tired. make sure you keep a good foot type as you walk

picture showing arch supports for the bottom of the feet

this is also why it is good to keep the feet dry, and wrap them in dry clothes. many people have a voice in their brain (learned hundreds times hundreds of years ago) which says: when the foot is wet, raise the front of the foot and make the rest of it straight. if you walk with wet feet the voice in your brain may tell you to do things that you do not realize, and you may walk in a way different from normal, putting more heavy stuff on a part of the body that is not used to it. same thing if the ground is not straight, or if your foot is in pain or very tired. (this is the same idea as something i wrote last year, where i said that if one of your feet is in pain it is easy to move heavy stuff in a bad way to make that foot have less pain, and then the other foot will be in pain as well)

there are many other small things i have learned about good ways to walk. how the front of your foot should push off the ground a little. how to walk is more about the push off than the step forward. how to put less heavy stuff on the back of the foot you may need to make each step smaller. all of this is good for the boy from story who was put in water as a baby. but only using the ten hundred most used words is getting tiring and this is no longer my job so i am giving up now