Foot to Core
March 2021
Being a ballet dancer in the fitness community can be a weird thing at times. I remember a number of times throughout my career feeling a bit like a fish out of water because the foundation of my knowledge of the body came from a very abstract way of thinking about how it operates.
At the time, when I began training people, it was the early 2000’s, and while I had no doubt in my ability to do my job, I found I was looking at different things than other trainers did.
Back then, the concept of fitness was mostly limited to big muscles and jumping around a lot to burn calories.
People would run for hours on end and finish by strapping themselves into big machines that would work on one muscle at a time, and it bewildered me a bit. It wasn’t until I started working with athletes until I found the secret of how to implement the value of my ballet training to help people achieve greater results and keep their bodies safe during the process. Obviously, every trainer has their own unique superpower and individual perspective, but I was fortunate that at the time I was finding my feet in the fitness industry, the fitness industry was changing around me, toward a new perspective I could sink my teeth into.
It was only a few years later that I noticed that trainers were stepping away from the bulky machines and looking for exercises that involved more integrative movements that train the entire body as one complete vessel. They called it “functional training” and it was all about training the body the same way we move around in everyday life, with all joints operating all together at the same time. That was that spark that got me thinking about what functional training meant and how it worked on the human body. And what’s more, I was seeing this new style of training have really profound effects on people of all backgrounds, from athletes to weight loss clients and especially people working through chronic injuries.
As the discussions of movement grew with more and more unique perspectives on the body, there was always one thing that resonated for me that became my foundation for training people—the foot to core connection.
I remember my first legitimate ballet class… it was actually an audition for a summer program, and I had no business being there. I’m still not sure why I chose to start that way, but that’s how it went. I remember being really nervous and determined to “sell myself” as a non-beginner. I watched all the other dancers and mimicked where their limbs went as best as I could.
I’d point my feet as hard as I could to make the correct shapes, but the instructor pointed me out immediately and asked if I’d never taken a ballet class before. I was embarrassed and confused as to how he could tell since up until then, I thought I had been faking it pretty well. I couldn’t tell how he spotted me because I was making all the same shapes like the other dancers. But how could he tell?
It wasn’t until later in my dance career that it made a lot more sense. Starting out, I expected that all of the lessons and teaching cues would have to do with the obvious body parts like “put the leg here” or “arm goes up like that”, but I can honestly tell you today that about 90% of all corrections and cues I ever got in 16 years of ballet training had to do with either how the foot operates on the floor or the hips/core structure moves the body. It made sense to me because those were the base of all movement… whatever that meant.
This connection between the feet and the core became everything that gave me any dance aesthetic, improved my turns and jumps, helped me lift my partners, and so on. It’s the not-so-obvious connection of the feet to the core that became the secret sauce for training my clients as well. You can see the relationship from feet to core in the process of creating a simple jump. The feet feel the weight shift as you prepare to jump and respond by expanding and becoming more rigid against the floor.
The body prepares to jump first by bracing the core for structure, and the feet shift the weight just the right amount so the legs can push off of a stable base. Finally, the feet follow the force by pushing through the floor during takeoff, and the core braces to maintain alignment in the air. It’s fascinating how closely all parts of the body have to move in synchronicity down to the most precise moments and reflexes.
If you look at the muscles of the human body, there is strong evidence of the correlation of the feet and the core structures. Larger muscles exist mostly on the limbs, and those are your force producers obviously.
But if you look around the feet, pelvis, spine, etc. there are many smaller muscles that provide stability for some of the most articulate bone structures in the body. I’m ignoring, of course, the smaller muscles of the shoulders and hands since I’m mostly referring to standing movement and posture… the shoulders and hands would bring in a whole other discussion of global core and quadruped movement analysis, which I won’t get into here. But if you take a look at where those important smaller muscles are, you can see the purpose of their existence. They would never be able to produce massive movement of joints, but their main purpose is to provide rigidity and articulation. If the feet were not able to brace and firm the foot in very precise ways, the larger muscles of the legs would have no bearing or structure to produce force from. Likewise, with the bracing and articulation of the core and hips, the legs would have nothing to connect to… kind of like lifting a 50-pound statue versus a 50-pound bag of loose rocks… the statue might be a bit easier to manage. You can even try it for yourself to see what I mean. Try taking off your shoes and walk in a small circle while letting the torso go limp and lazy. Do you feel the increased pressure on the bones of the hips and spine?
How much harder do your feet strike the floor in every step? Likewise, try walking the same circle with lazy feet slapping the floor each step… feel any impact in your hips and torso? It doesn’t matter how strong your legs are, if you build a house on sand, it’s gonna sink.
But there’s even more to the foot to core connection than simply bracing. The sensory mechanisms of the feet that can feel where your weight is, along with how much pressure is needed to resist the floor at any given time has to be translated to how the core responds in small movements that shift your body weight. You can feel this any time you try standing on one foot. You realize that balance is definitely not a skill of stillness. Each little wobble of the body and each little wiggle of the foot on the floor is like a computer program that was written (and often re-written several times) in the coding of your nervous system as you learned to walk as a child.
The connection between the feet and core doesn’t even stop there! The feet and core have strong physical connectivity from the bottoms of your feet to the pelvic floor and even up to the diaphragm. The human body has roughly 640 skeletal muscles, each one surrounded by a special type of tissue called fascia, which serves as a sort of saran wrap that contains and connects the entire body. The contraction or stretch of one muscle pulls or loosens the fascia, and the change is felt in other parts of the body.
There are direct fascial connections between the core and feet that interpret each signal of movement, much like someone pulling a rope at the bottom of the well, signaling the person at the top to reel the rope in.
I realize I’m nerding out on you at this point, but this stuff is really important to anyone training for a specific physical skill and even more important for anyone dealing with structural damage or chronic joint pain. This connection between the feet and the core provides the key to enhancing posture, balance, joint alignment, force production, impact absorption, and can even influence the way you breathe! This connection needs to be trained regularly, and it applies to pretty much everyone in one way or another, both in performance training as well as everyday life.
Every step you take, your feet receive about 1.5x your bodyweight, and the muscular firing response of the feet is crafted to happen with a specific accuracy down to the millisecond. And every step you take has millions of different adaptive responses depending on the surface you land on, the speed you are going and, most importantly, what other parts of the body are doing at that exact moment that might be shifting your weight in different ways. The connection from foot to core is so important that one without the other would definitely lead to either compensation or injury or more.
The question becomes, why is it that we have hundreds of stability exercises for the core (like planks, for example) but nothing so popular for the feet? And on top of that, why do we feel the need to buy shoes that support the feet so much that the intrinsic, stiffening muscles of the foot have little to no work to do at all? It begs the question of what happens to the feet when the support is taken away, and the deep foot muscles have lost all of their strength? Much less, what happens to the function of the core if all of that strength is lost?
Basically, walking around with weakened muscles of the foot would render the entire body mush less stable and much less powerful in all situations. To put a visual image on it, it would be like taking the most powerful car on an icy road with no treads on the tires. The car would certainly move, but not the way you might want it to.
Developing the skill of foot to core connectivity is, like any skill, a process. It takes years to train your walking pattern to become less wobbly when we are children. It also takes years for athletes and dancers alike to develop the foot to core connection to be able to jump higher, run faster, balance longer, and stretch deeper.
It would be obvious that the same amount of time would be needed to develop connection and strength for anyone hoping to correct bad posture, joint mechanics and to prevent unnecessary injuries.
The only clear conclusion is that we need to be finding more and more ways to incorporate foot training into every fitness regimen the exact same way we do with core work. And the funny thing is that it’s really not that hard to do. Step one would be to find ways to safely and progressively train the body without using artificial arch supports for the feet – usually starting small and working into larger movements with time as you get stronger. Choosing to exercise barefoot in some cases or at least trying out shoes with less support, for starters. Step two would be trying to find a more well-rounded training approach to the exercises we do by incorporating balance, agility, and larger body movements, rather than just sticking to the same one-dimensional moves we love so much (like abdominal crunches, for example) simply because we feel that awesome burn! Some of the best exercises don’t burn at all! Lastly, and probably most importantly, we need to challenge ourselves to deepen the connection of the pelvic floor and core to our basal support system in the feet by paying attention to them. Feel how your feet move in a squat. Sense how activating the pelvic floor can influence the lunge. Experience the feeling of doing that side lunge and syncing it up with the breath.
The great news is that there is already a plethora of exercise classes that have these concepts built into the curriculum. Pilates and yoga come to mind since they are already so popular, but there are class formats that dive even deeper like Barre, Balletone, Barefoot Strong, Cardio Yoga to name a few. Similarly, most balance-based strength classes like the ones done on the BOSU balance trainer are a fantastic way to train that connection. Even going to your favorite bodyweight Bootcamp or H.I.I.T. class can be useful if you pay attention to the influence of the feet and core in every move. The options are endless. The tools are already on your body. The only thing left is awareness and making it a priority in your fitness/wellness regimen.
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