Flexing The Arch Muscle

When I started this project last year I was new to blogging. The original focus for this site was on flat feet and overpronation. As the site grew I found that I wanted to write about other areas of health and fitness as well. So I created a separate site to cover a broader range of topics and the original content here became a sub-section of the new site.

During that process, I had to trim away a lot of the flat feet specific material to make everything fit within the context of the new site. I wanted to continue with the weekly progress updates for this project but I realized there wasn’t a good place for them with the direction the other site had taken.

Welcome to the new and improved Fix Flat Feet!

Over the past few months I received several emails asking me to re-publish the information from the older site. I decided to revive this site so that all the old content could have its own space. This will keep the content better organized and hopefully make it easier for people to find what they are looking for.

Arch Strength

In a few months it will be a year since I started working to improve my arches. I’ve learned a great deal during that time about why I had flat feet for so long and what strategies worked best for me to build up the arches in my feet.

Here is a photo I took at the start of the project:

I remember looking at this picture last year and wondering what that stuff was in the place where my arch should be. It looked like a wad of fat. I really didn’t know what it was or why it was there.

Muscle Pinned Under The Foot

Now I know that most of the stuff is muscle. Unused muscle. Muscles don’t literally turn to mush but that’s certainly what it felt like.

Regaining Arch Strength

The muscle felt soft and mushy because it wasn’t being used. Either the muscle was weak to begin with causing the arch to flatten, or the arch collapsed putting the muscle in a position where it couldn’t work. I’m still debating which came first.

Now I know it is a muscle because I can feel it tense up when I do arch strengthening exercises. If I over do it I can tell because the muscle will almost go into a spasm. But that’s okay because at least I know it’s working again!

This muscle is called the abductor hallucis and one of its main functions is holding the shape of the arch. One way to tell if the abductor is strong or not is to see if you can spread your big toe away from the second toe. When I began doing arch strengthening exercises I couldn’t to save my life!

No matter how hard I concentrated I wasn’t able to spread the toes apart. When I discovered that, I immediately made it a goal to get that strength back. It took a lot of work and initially all it seemed I could do was move the toe up or down, even when that wasn’t my intention. After several months, along with working on exercises like the short foot, my brain finally connected with that muscle again and ever since I’ve stayed focused on making that arch muscle as strong as possible.