A bit about the foot
The human body is a feat of mechanical and biological engineering - the sheer complexity and elegance is astounding. What's even more incredible is how well it works. We rarely pay much attention to it, subject it to an array of abuse and it keeps going, resilient and reliable...most of the time anyway.

And our feet tend to be the one area that receives the least attention. With a quarter of the bones in the body, thirty three joints and over a hundred muscles, the foot is complex...but, we barely seem to be able to use them for much except walking on! So what can we do about this?

Fitness training for your feet
Now it is difficult to find ways of exercising your feet; it's not like you can curl a dumbbell with your toes - and, since they bear almost all our bodyweight when we are on our feet, we probably don't need to train them the same way we'd train other areas.

The worst thing we do to our feet is that we restrict them from moving freely. Sub optimal range of motion causes compensatory movement elsewhere in the body; usually in places where such movement is excessive and harmful and this can lead to strains, tears and injuries.

The first real marketing attack from a shoe manufacturer on functional footwear was from Nike (as far as I remember; if there are any shoe historians reading this please feel free to comment) who produced shoes with air bubbles, shock absorbers, all sorts of technology. Unfortunately, they all suffered from one major problem and that was the concepts behind them were total bollocks. By replacing the function of your foot with their high tech soles, your feet lose their range of motion, strength and flexibility. Things got a bit better with the goat paw shoe but still...

Does that means most shoes are out of the running in terms of proper functional footwear, how about going back to nature and ditching shoes altogether? The barefoot extremists obviously haven't spent much time walking down Cricklewood Broadway on a Friday night; I'd want a biohazard suit to dodge the leftover kebabs, broken glass and other nasties.

So high tech is out, we're unlikely to go back to nature and frolic through the city in bare feet. What do we do?

Luckily, there's a new wave of functional footwear that claim to be the best thing for your feet. We'll have a look to see if that's true or not in the next few blog posts. In the meantime try a couple of very simple exercises to get your feet moving.

Toe wiggles. Best done on public transport as its guaranteed to get you a seat.
Foot circles. Rotate your feet in slow circles with as wide a range of motion as possible. Both directions please and keep your socks on.
Toe points, foot flexing. Simply point your toes as far as you can and then pull the foot back as far as you can. Again, the key here is to regain the full range of motion capable from your feet.