Plantar Fasciitis-How to Stretch and Strengthen Your Feet

I've had a few patients who suffer from Plantar Fasciitis and in conjunction with the treatments prescribed by their doctors, we do some work with the feet which seems to help relieve the symptoms and strengthens their arches.

One tool that helps relieve the pain and help stretch the fascia is a tennis ball. Stand upright and roll the tennis ball along the bottom of the foot with as much pressure as you can handle. After a couple of minutes place the ball under the toes and push down, wrapping the toes over the ball with small pulses, 15 times. Move the ball down under the ball of the foot and repeat. Move to the arches, repeat and again under the heel. The tennis ball stretches the muscles in the bottom of the feet which in turn affects the muscles all the way up the back of the body.

Try this interesting test. Stand tall and bend over letting your arms dangle. Check where your fingers fall in space, are they even between the hands or is one hand hanging longer? Now, massage ONE of your feet with the tennis ball for 2 minutes and then bend and dangle again. Notice how the hand on the same side you used the tennis ball on hangs lower than the first time! This is a true testament to how our feet affect the whole body.

Joseph Pilates designed the foot corrector which helps strengthen the arches of the feet when done correctly. Yamuna also makes The Foot Wakers and are wonderful! I often have my clients do standing footwork on the Foot Wakers to connect to their feet. There's also a fabulous exercise you can do with a towel.

Take a small dish towel and lay it flat on a smooth floor right under your heel with the majority of the towel toward your toes. Lift the front of your foot, place it down and try to move the towel toward your heel with the ball of your foot causing your arch to rise. Do this a few times until you've scrunched the towel all the way to your heel. This may be difficult at first but gets easier the more you do it and the stronger your feet become. I recommend finding a Pilates Instructor to help you connect with your feet if you have this painful condition.

Kale-A Healthy Snack

Do you ever find yourself reaching for a bag of chips to snack on and then read the nutritional label with horror after eating the whole bag? I know, I did too. This is, until I discovered how to make kale taste like chips.

I know it may be hard to believe that leafy greens could ever resemble a potato chip but I'm here to tell you how to do just that. Let's start with what you'll need to make this transformation:

• A bunch of kale

• Olive, Sesame or Grapeseed oil

• Sea Salt and Pepper

First you'll chop the kale into bite sized pieces and then pour about a tablespoon of oil into your hands. Rub the kale down with the oil so that it's evenly and lightly coated. Sprinkle on the sea salt and pepper. You can also be creative and add other spices like sesame seeds or chili flakes. Whatever tastes good to you works well. Spread the kale out on a baking sheet and turn the oven on to 350 degrees. Place the kale in the oven and let it cook about 10 minutes until it crisps up but be careful not to burn it. You've successfully made kale chips!

The best part about this snack is that it's loaded with calcium, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin K and contains no hydrogenated oil. I've tried kale chips out on kids and they love them. The only problem with getting your kids addicted is they will always be asking you to make them!

Fair Trade: What, Why, & Where

We are all aware of the endless issues we face socially, economically, and environmentally in our world today. It is very easy to become overwhelmed and in response throw up our hands and say, "what can I do, as one person, that will make a difference." We can set our individual intention to embark on a journey of empowerment and share this journey with our community, so that we may step forward knowing that we can and do make a difference both individually and as a collective community.

A good first stop on this journey is Fair Trade. I start my day, as many of you likely do, with a good 'ol cup o'Joe. The sound of the beans grinding, the sweet aroma of it brewing, the steam rising off my foaming soy, and the delicious, invigorating first taste are such fundamental necessities to a day starting off just right. Our simple daily rituals, such as enjoying a cup of coffee, can have significant implications, socially, economically, and environmentally.

Americans consume one-fifth of the world's coffee, making our country the largest consumer of coffee in the world. Coffee is the United States largest food import and the world's second most valuable traded commodity, behind only petroleum.

Fair Trade: What is it?

Fair Trade is a world-wide collaborative system to ensure producers receive a fair price and a living wage for their commodity. Fair Trade is not exclusive to coffee, and continues to expand its reach.

The following are highlights cited on Global Exchange regarding Fair Trade

• Forced labor and exploitative child labor are not allowed

• Buyers and producers trade under direct long-term relationships

• Producers have access to financial and technical assistance

• Sustainable production techniques are encouraged

• Working conditions are healthy and safe

• Equal employment opportunities are provided for all

• All aspects of trade and production are open to public accountability

Fair Trade: Why?

Understanding the significance of your purchase power allows you to wield it with ethical intention, that can have far-reaching results. When you choose Fair Trade coffee you are ensuring that participating farmers receive a living wage, and that they are provided loans and assistance with transitioning to organic farming. Coffee purchasers must pledge to pay a minimum of $1.26 per/pound for Fair Trade coffee beans. Without Fair Trade guarantees, farmers have been known to not only go into poverty, but to take their children out of school to work on the farms. One cup of coffee costs us more than the farmers get per pound! When you choose that cup of coffee, consider the sustainability of that purchase for the grower and for our environment.

Fair Trade: Where can I use my purchasing power? Look for the Fair Trade sign on coffee bags and other products that you know are imported. If you can't find them, start asking businesses if they can start carrying Fair Trade products. Our money makes businesses successful so it makes sense to support sustainable business practices.

Spine Stretch Forward

This exercise used to confuse me until I learned to do it correctly and now it’s one of my favorites because of the stretch I get on my back and hamstrings. The key to getting the stretch is lengthening the spine up and then rolling it inward instead of flexing at the hip. It’s easy to say “lengthen the spine” but to actually execute the command is quite challenging. I like to rely on images to get the feeling here. Imagine you have a spring in your belly that connects the ribcage to the pelvis. Pull the spring open with your belly and you will feel your ribcage actually lift up which decompresses your spine. Take that feeling all the way up through the top of your head. Notice how your sitz bones root down in opposition. Start to curl the spine from the head down without loosing the open spring feeling in your belly. If your belly button starts to travel toward the floor right away you’ve lost the exercise and won’t tone your abs or stretch your spine. Your hands can slide forward at shoulder height or you can place them behind your head. If your belly starts to push out you’ve lost the open spring feeling and are now closing it, open it back up! The more you lift, the greater it feels. Use your inhale to lengthen up, exhale to soften the ribcage and curl, inhale to restack starting from the ground up.

Spine stretch forward has a lot of things that can go wrong with it. If your hamstrings are tight you may sit into your low back instead on lengthening out of it. Bend your knees or sit on a folded up towel, yoga block, or a book if that’s the case to avoid injuring your spinal disks or ligaments. Your shoulders can get out of control here and take over. Shrugging your shoulders to your ears isn’t lengthening, it’s just overworking your traps which doesn’t feel that great. They need to soften down and be held in place by the muscles in the mid back to go along for the ride. Flex your feet, firm up your legs by pressing the backs of the legs down, pushing the floor away. This will root the lower half of your body down to help lift the upper half in opposition.

What is this exercise good for? It tones the abdominals, lengthens the hamstrings, decompresses the spine, and lengthens the back muscles next to your spine. This is a great exercise to learn if you have any disc herniations, bulging discs or sciatica. Gravity is a force that we need to work against to maintain our spinal health. Remember, any forward bending exercises should be avoided if you have osteoporosis.

Push Through

Push Through is very similar to Spine Stretch Forward with an element of Roll Down. The Push Through Bar allows us to connect into our abdominals via the connection of our hands to the wooden bar and our feet on the metal poles. If we think about the Pilates Method, how Joe created the mat work first which led him to design the equipment to get people “in” their bodies, we can begin to understand the purpose of the Push Through Bar. Holding our arms up by our ears or reaching forward as in Spine Stretch Forward, often causes the upper traps to fire, muscles that are large and often already overworked. Our hand connection to the bar allows us to rest this large muscle group and bring the work into the shoulder girdle. This connection also allows us to roll the pelvis back away from the grounded feet without sinking into the back. If we do the exercise correctly, we open the spring not with movement from the arms, but movement from the spine via the abdominals.

The connection of the feet to the poles helps us “stand” in our feet with the help of the mat allowing the overworked quads and hip flexors to relax so we can move from the psoas. This exercise looks pretty simple but in reality is quite complicated. It takes a strong pelvic floor connection to find an internal lift instead of hunkering down to move the bar. The spine should lengthen up over the bar as it’s curling which feels amazing! Pilates is designed to help us breath better and you can imagine how your inhale is very important in this exercise.