If You Want to improve Your Body, Change Your Environment First

If you follow me (or Unshoes) on Instagram, you know that I advocate walking with your feet pointed straight forward. I often compare our bodies to cars. If the wheels are not aligned, then they wear out quickly and you get horrible gas milage. One of my own personal struggles is correcting this in my own gait and stance. I tend to walk and even stand with my feet pointed outward. In order to correct yourself, you need to have awareness of what actually needs to be changed. It is difficult to always be aware of how you move so I use outside things to help me measure my body alignment and increase my own awareness. One of the things I use to increase awareness is by looking at my footprints. I often feel like I’m walking really well with my feet pointed forward and then when I turn around and look at my footprints in the dirt, I see that what I felt was not the same as reality! While this can be discouraging, it is also liberating.Continue reading→

Your Calves are HUGE!

I don’t mean that your calves are literally huge. Well, they might be, and that’s cool because calves are awesome! What I mean is that the role your calves play in your overall health is huge. For the most part, I think we tend to simply forget about our calves when it comes to our health, however, ignore your calves at your own peril!

It all starts when the calf muscle begins to shorten. You might be thinking that your calves are not short. You don’t have pain in your calves, so they must be doing great, right? Actually, it often isn’t your calf that feels pain when it gets shortened. It shows up in other areas, and this is why it can be tricky to spot issues caused (or amplified) by shortened calf muscles. While working at Unshoes, we have sometimes gone out to different events to market our sandals. One of the most frequent comments I get are, “I would love to wear those but I have to have arch support”. Or, “Those look awesome, but I have plantar fasciitis”. I’m no podiatrist, or biomechanist so I’m not going to claim that plantar fasciitis is caused by tight calves, but I feel comfortable telling you that tight calves can affect it. Really, it’s just basic logic if you think about it. Plantar fasciitis is a pain that shows up in the bottom fascia (flesh) of the foot, often near the heel. It feels like the tendons are being pulled and tightened like a guitar string. According to webMD, (which is always right because it’s on the internet!) plantar fasciitis is caused by “strain” on the ligament that stretches between the heel and the toes. Guess what part of the body your calf muscle is connected to through another ligament? Yeah, the heel. If your calf muscle (which is pretty powerful by the way) is pulling on your heel then chances are it can affect other ligaments that connect to the same bone. It’s basic mechanics. Of course there are other factors involved as well but the two parts of the body are connected. Literally.Continue reading→

Comfort Kills

My wife and I bought a “fixer-upper” home in the country. It is a very unique home and while the original construction was sound, much of the house was in poor condition and needed some serious updates. This is still a work in progress. One day my brother-in-law was over and my wife was telling him what our long term plans for the house were. She mentioned that we were going to get rid of the couch. He asked if we would get a new one and my wife told him that we would not. He wondered what we would replace it with. We said we were not going to replace it at all. With a quizzical look he asked us where we would sit! We explained that we would keep a few chairs for company but that we would mostly sit on the floor. He was understandably shocked and stated that that didn’t sound very comfortable! Well, for him it isn’t very comfortable but we are growing used to it. Typically, I prefer sitting on the floor to sitting on a cushy couch. (I’ll write more about that decision later)Continue reading→