How To Move Around With The Help Of Your Feet

It's amazing how strong and yet weak our body can be. We can lift extremely heavy things, yet a small injury can leave us without much mobility. Our feet especially fit this paradox perfectly. They hold us upright, able to withstand all of our bodies and then some. Yet, because our feet are really made up of many small bones working together, just one small injury and you dare not put one-tenth of your body weight on them. It's actually an area we don’t seem too bothered about until it bothers us. We wear shoes to get around so our feet are supported. The rotation of our feet are limited in shoes so we don’t really feel the pain of injuries as we should. But if you have severe pain in your foot, what do you do? You can’t crawl everywhere, you can’t hop anywhere either. You need to know how you can keep living life even with a foot injury.

Compression and rigidity

Since the foot is like a bone jigsaw, the more we can keep every piece together and in the right position, we can carry on in some capacity. If you do have some kind of injury that has been caused by impact trauma, then uses a foot compression brace is going to fill in for the lack of stability. The compression will push the bones together, making the entire structure into one bloc. You still shouldn’t put a lot of pressure on your foot but it will allow you to at least put some kind of load on the sole. Depending on the kind of compression brace you have, you can still wear shoes. Some braces are larger and stronger which means you might need to wear open footwear such as sandals.

Inward and downward

The ankle is a small but very strong joint. It allows our foot to rotate up and down which is essential for something as simple as walking. However it's not designed to be laterally rotated, especially inward. You have most likely seen an ankle injury that has been caused by an inward rotation of the foot, and then downward pressure from the weight of the rest of the body. This causes the ankle ball to literally be forced out of the socket. This can cause ligament damage which may require a professional opinion from orthopedics. They have ligament repair surgery to put all the threads back together and then fit them tightly to the ankle. The attachment allows the foot to regain it's rotation. If you have an ankle ligament injury it's best not to make it worse as you’re dealing with soft tissue and not bone. Use crutches to move around while wearing brace boots which keep the entire foot locked in a comfortable relaxed position.

It's important to understand the type of injury you have to your foot to know what are your limiting factors. If it's a blunt force trauma injury to the face of the foot, then use a compression brace. For more serious injuries to ligaments, a brace boot and crutches is recommended.