The short foot exercise was one of the first exercises I started doing to strengthen my arches. I recently came across an old video I filmed of myself performing the short foot. The video was taken about a month after I started working on my arches back in 2012.
I thought it would be interesting to remake the video to show how things have changed since then. So in the video below, I combined the old and the updated clips of me doing the short foot exercise.
A few things stand out when watching these clips. First is that the base of the big toe lifts off the ground during the first short foot attempt. I do a better job keeping the big toe down on the second attempt, but I remember how difficult that was to do back then.
Keeping the ball of the foot on the ground was a key component of many of the exercises I worked on to correct my flat feet.
Another thing that stands out is how flat my foot was before. I’m always a little shocked when I look at old photos or videos from when I started this project.
But the most interesting thing to me is the comparison of the starting and end positions of the short foot exercise.
When making a collage of the before and after screenshots, I noticed the end position from before looks almost the same as the starting position now.
When I started training for my arches, seeing that I could form an arch in my foot with the short foot exercise gave me hope that my feet could improve. Now, even when I try to collapse my arches, I can’t get them to look like they did in the starting picture.
