Tag Archives: foot

Children, Bare Feet & Movement

Barefoot Is Better for Developing Motor Skills

Close-up of a barefoot baby girl's foot.

A baby’s foot.

A recent study showed that children who tend to go barefoot have better motor skills than those who habitually wear shoes. The barefoot kids had better balance, among other advantages. When you consider how many shoes restrict the foot‘s ability to move, the results make sense.

Also, I wonder, do barefoot children just tend to move more in general?

Read the entire article here on Neuroscience News.

What’s the Best Kind of Shoe?

Barefoot toddler on tiptoe with magnets in front of refrigerator.

A toddler’s feet.

Clients often ask me, “What kind of shoe should I wear?” My answer, “The one with as little support as is comfortable for you.”If you’re currently using arch support or orthotics, don’t suddenly stop using them.

Could you practice walking at home, five minutes at a time, barefoot? Or in flat shoes with no built-in arch? Or can you practice walking with your orthotics, without collapsing your feet into them, but using them as a point of reference to organize your feet around?

And yes, we can practice using our feet and entire skeletons so that your arches awaken. I was diagnosed with flat feet as a child. I can now distinguish support in my two longitudinal arches and the one transverse arch; of course, that’s clearer with one foot than the other.

Standing Lesson

One simple movement to play with: stand with your feet slightly further apart than usual, barefoot if possible. Shift yourself a little left and right. Imagine that your whole skeleton is like a pendulum above your feet, so you lead with the crown of your head.

Feel how you’re using your feet. Do they collapse as you shift weight? That is, does the contact of the standing surfaces of your feet with the ground change as you shift from side to side?

Imagine now that, as you shift your skeleton left, it’s your right foot that sends you. As if you’re distancing the crown of your head from your right foot. Let your left foot send you right.

Do this a few times. Stop and observe yourself. How did your awareness of your feet change?

Focus on Feet in Oak Lawn

Would you like to:

  • Walk on feet which feel like pillows?
  • Clarify what good balance feels like?
  • Experience ease in standing?
  • Discover what some of the 26 bones in your feet are good for?
Illustration of a human foot with connective tissue

Diagram of a human foot with connective tissue

If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, join us for this series!

Our over-arching theme for winter and spring 2018: Discover Yourself from the Ground Up.

In this six-week series, we’ll begin by building the foundation: investigating the structure and function of your feet. Though the focus will be your feet, each lesson will include all of you.

[Fun fact: you have no ankles! Those knobs above your feet are the ends of your tibia and fibula bones!]

You learn most movement practices from the outside in, by imitation. In Awareness Through Movement®, you’re invited to learn from the inside out. Take your discoveries into another movement practice or your everyday life.

6 Tuesdays, Jan. 9-Feb. 3, 6:30-7:45 pm. $105.
Limit: 5 participants. Room for 1 more as of 1/4.

Focus on Feet in N. Dallas

Would you like to:

  • Walk on feet which feel like pillows?
  • Clarify what good balance feels like?
  • Experience ease in standing?
  • Discover what some of the 26 bones in your feet are good for?
Illustration of a human foot with connective tissue

Diagram of a human foot with connective tissue

If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, join us for this series!

Our over-arching theme for winter and spring 2018: Discover Yourself from the Ground Up.

In this 6-week series, we’ll begin by building the foundation: investigating the structure and function of your feet. Though the focus will be your feet, each lesson will include all of you.

[Fun fact: you have no ankles! Those knobs above your feet are the ends of your tibia and fibula bones!]

You learn most movement practices from the outside in, by imitation. In Awareness Through Movement®, you’re invited to learn from the inside out. Take your discoveries into another movement practice or your everyday life.

6 Mondays, Jan. 8-Feb. 2, 6:25-7:30 pm. $105.
Limit: 15 participants. Room for 1 more as of 1/4.
Register on the MoveStudio website.

Anti-Fragile Walking Step By Step

Feldenkrais teacher Andrew Gibbons

Andrew Gibbons, GCFP

Would you like to walk with greater ease and pleasure? Most of us walk with deeply grooved habits, repeating moments that lead to pain and stiffness. If we study these moments, we can create stability and integrity in our walk. With practice, we can clarify and ennoble an action we’ve done unconsciously our entire lives. Taught by Andrew Gibbons, GCFP.

In this 2-day course, you’ll raise your walking from an unconscious habit to an informed practice. You’ll emerge with a clearer perspective on how walking works and the art of transferring weight elegantly from leg to leg. You’ll learn what, why, and how to practice with greater specificity. Then walking can become a path to health. It can be your zen, your gym, and your joy. Limit: 25 participants. Room for 3 more as of 3/21.

Andrew Gibbons working with a student.The course focuses on three crucial moments in walking. These moments will set the parameters to test skeletal support, muscular efficiency, and balance.

As a participant you will learn:

  1. How walking is learned, and how learning is walked.
  2. Why your soft tissue cannot survive a disorganized skeleton.
  3. To see and sense shearing forces that poor walking creates, and learn how to move better by choice.
  4. Key relationships in the foot, ankle, and knee that every good walk maintains.
  5. “Do-anywhere” practices that help you tune your walking balance and maintain it throughout the day.
  6. How to use observational skills to improve by observing other people and yourself.
  7. Awareness Through Movement® practices that deepen your understanding and skill.

Participants will receive a set of four Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement lessons:  “Walking with the Ground.”

Instructor Andrew Gibbons is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Teacher in New York City. He’s spent the last 8 years uncovering the moments in walking that tell us the most about our posture and self organization. In his private practice, he teaches the humans of New York how to organize themselves better for the second half of life than they did for the first. Andrew has been a Feldenkrais Teacher since 2003. He’s on the staff of Jeff Haller’s IOPS Academy, a graduate program for Feldenkrais teachers in NYC and Seattle.

COST: Late $325 (by Apr. 5); At door $350 (if space permits). Students $200.

Register on Brown Paper Tickets. Or send a check payable to “Dallas Feldenkrais” to:
P.O. Box 797503
Dallas, TX 75379