Barefoot Massage Open Challenge: 2024.3

Week 3: Addressing imbalances felt in your Feet while working

Continuing on from last week’s Ankle & Knee focus, this weeks focus for the Barefoot Massage Challenge is the next typical restriction we notice in Barefoot Massage Therapists across the industry: Foot imbalances!

What’s in this post?

• Blablabla: deep reads for deeper feets from Jeni Spring

• Foot & Toe stretching with Sharon Bryant

• Toe, Ball & Arch roll outs with Jeni Spring

• Foot strengthening and Mobility with Ashley Shears

• Foot alignment and weight awareness with Jeni Spring

• TLDR recap

But first, some “blablabla”:

Remember when the hype about barefoot shoes started? Minimalist footwear design is getting cuter, more functional and more accepted with the general public - strong, healthy feet are definitely more mainstream than when I started massaging in 2002! One of the main reasons to wear barefoot/minimalist shoes is to recreate the natural movements of a barefoot foot during your walking and running gait - but with a shoe on. Walking on uneven, variable textured, different density types of surfaces challenges your brain and body through proprioception, constantly recalibrating your joints and intrinsic muscles of balance and stabilization.

Guess what we do for a living!? We get paid to be minimalist foot nerds! As Barefoot Massage Therapists, our feet are interacting with variable surfaces for hours at a time while at work - not only are we actually barefoot on the table/mat, we really are putting our bodies and nervous system through a daily challenge in our chosen profession. Lucky us!

I’m not just talking about the different bodies we step on, but also our massage tables and mats. Yep - these are surfaces that alter our movement patterns with the challenges that our feet are thirsty to figure out, but they also require awareness and strength to maintain alignment in the whole body.

Long story short, …wait wait wait. This is the point of this Substack, to give you the long-form content! So no, I won’t cheat and get to the short story for you, LOL. KEEP READING!

The foot exercises in the videos below, and even Sara’s yoga block balancing act from last week, I want you to try all of those on the floor. Then try all of them ON YOUR MASSAGE TABLE. Yep. It’ll be harder. (You’ve got your bars to hold onto for balance, don’t stress!)

I know that my personal alignment-cheat-mode tendency while standing on a massage table starts with a medial tilt (AKA pronation) of my arches, followed by a medial rotation of my femurs, which influences my pelvic position, followed by a rib compensation (- that last part I’ll tell you about in next weeks episode!) The softer surface of the padded massage table requires more of my foot to come into contact with what I’m standing on in order to find balance, stability and adaptability during movements, making my foot fall in on itself and lose all integrity in alignment.

I’ve been working on:

1. removing layers of padding from my table.

2. lifting the medial longitudinal arch of my standing foot when it’s on the table to actively create the preferred alignment that supports my joints all the way through my body.

The first part is the easy one to start making a change today with. Hopefully it’s getting warmer in your neck of the woods, so maybe you could shed the table warmer and loose a layer of squish. I used to have a fluffy fleece pad laying over a sorta fluffy heating pad (to lessen the sensation of those electrical coils felt by the client,) all this on top of an extra-padded upgraded Earthlite Ellora table. That’s pretty much the norm for the industry, with a subconscious goal to make that massage table as comfy as the couch your clients veg-out on for hours every night, LOL. It is nice, but it also makes the massage lighter, and our jobs harder. «GASP, WHAT?!?»

Have you ever felt those tables at a Physical Therapist or Chiropractors office? Those are meant to not ~absorb~ pressure and let clients/patients sink, but are meant to support them in alignment and almost rebound pressure back into the body.

So as you’ve hopefully had a chance to feel by now, the differences of doing our suggested foot/ankle exercises on the floor as well as on the table, you may now notice what I’m talking about. If you did those exercises on a table at a PT’s clinic, they’d be easier there than on a typical massage table.

SO, all that being said, we are actually standing on our clients, so we don’t necessarily lay them out on a slab and make them “take it” for the sake of our own alignment while working. If you think that the soft table is contributing to your body aches, consider taking baby steps to gradually introduce your clients to a firmer support from below, while giving your feet and body time to adjust to the grounding source they stand on while working. Too much change all at once and everything will freak out a little - so take it in moderation. Either 1) remove a layer and work that way for a while, or 2) while working on whatever surface you have, consciously lift your standing foot’s arch, rotate that femur and stack that knee to point over the toes, and level out any tilts of your pelvis if they are sinking into that grounded leg. Build that strength in action, mindfulness in every movement.

If you already work on either a yoga or padded mat doing Fijian Matwork, Rossiter Techniques, Shiatsu, Thai, etc, then you probably already have a firmer surface area than your table to stand on. This is a great challenge and will complement the “standing-on-the-table” styles of Barefoot Massage you do up there.

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Before we get to the exercises, a blurb about the elephant in the room: how your feet move determines how your body moves. We know all know how FASCIAnating this is! Sometimes, though, it is so subtle that it takes someone else to see it across your entire body. This is one of the greatest benefits to continuing your Barefoot Massage training with instructors who have a wide scope of training, practice and experience to help call attention to and tweak your body mechanics during the massages you do. If you’d like your alignment-in-motion assessed, talk to our team of instructors about how they can help you with something specific in your next class, or even if they can help you through a video consultation or mentorship.

The following content will be available for free through July 1st, 2024. After then it (along with other “FEETured“ content, like a podcast!) will be a part of our paid subscription, $8/month or $80/year.

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Foot Help

Stretch

Sharon Bryant, our Alabama instructor has been practicing Barefoot Massage since 2009. Her scope of practice was extended through her Roll Model Method Practitioner Training to allow her to teach the public principles and practices to enhance mobility, reduce stress, transform pain and build body awareness. Today’s content focuses on passively stretching and mobilizing the toes and metatarsals in an easy way that is typically more comfortable than wearing toe spacers. (Which, to be fair, those are also a great thing to have so that you can do Sharon’s stretches and think about her while walking around the house barefoot!)

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Roll

Jeni Spring, that’s me - has been practicing Barefoot Massage since 2003. Her scope of practice was extended into programing self-myofascial release rollouts for individuals, groups and special populations through her Roll Model Method training and certification. Jeni has a 200-hour Hatha/Vinyasa Yoga Instructor certification under her belt, and among many other nerd-level massage/yoga/movement/physical therapy education adventures including corrective movement training influences from Katie Bowman’s “Move your DNA” class, her recent Structural Integration certification through Anatomy Trains really brings a whole new practice of embodiment to the table.

This is a longer video because it builds into the Awareness topic later in this post, and ties in the concepts of standing on soft versus hard surfaces written in the beginning of this post. Get your massage balls, take your time, and feel where these simple moves impact your body.

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Strengthen

Ashley Shears is our Southern California instructor in Tustin. Ashley has been a Barefoot Massage Therapist since 2015. In 2020, Ashley immersed herself into comprehensive biomechanics and movement-based training built around a therapeutic style of conscious corrective exercise, and became a Certified Yoga Tune Up Instructor. Her approach merges between the worlds of yoga, fitness, pain management, and myofascial self-care.

Today’s content with Ashley works on an active movement exercise that might also be a bit of a tongue twister for your brain: get those feet smart and practice these moves for strong, mobile, reactive feet!

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Awareness

It’s the bosslady Jeni again: no introduction needed, right? OK, getting to the point of this video, you may not see a lot of movement happening on camera, but take your socks off, stand on something, put your headphones in, and let Jeni guide you though the exercise.

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TLDR?

Watch all sections of this weeks content in 1 video: