Wholistic Fitness

coach compressing into his unique “Hanuman Warrior Servant Pose” from his HP Yoga® System…this posture can produce excruciatingly intense pain from the brittle feet of endurance athletes and others…as coach teaches, “When the feet are brittle, so too is our brain and organs.”

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Reinforcing the importance of vitality via foot plasticity, from The Brain That Changes Itself:

“Finally, they are working on ‘gross motor control,’ a function that declines as we age, leading to loss of balance, the tendency to fall, and difficulties with mobility. Aside from the failure of vestibular processing, this decline is caused by the decrease in sensory feedback from our feet. According to Merzenich, shoes, worn for decades, limit the sensory feedback from our feet to our brain. If we went barefoot, our brains would receive many different kinds of input as we went over uneven surfaces. Shoes are a relatively flat platform that spreads out the stimuli, and the surfaces we walk on are increasingly artificial and perfectly flat. This leads us to dedifferentiate the maps for the soles of our feet and limit how touch guides our foot control. Then we may start to use canes, walkers, or crutches or rely on other senses to steady ourselves. By resorting o these compensations instead of exercising our failing brain systems, we hasten their decline.

As we age, we want to look down at our feet while walking down stairs or on slightly challenging terrain, because we’re not getting much information from our feet. As Merzenich escorted his mother-in-law down the stairs of the villa, he urged her to stop looking down and stat feeling her way, so that she would maintain, and develop, the sensory map for her foot, rather than letting it waste away.”

Norman Doldge, author, The Brain That Changes Itself

Sent in from HP Yoga student, Sandy Roberge, Flagstaff.