CHAPTER 9 Clothing—If the Shoe Fits

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”

—Kahlil Gibran

Have you ever thought about the potential downstream effects of “binding” your hips and knees with tight pants, limiting your full range of motion in a squat, for example? Squatting is not just a gym-based exercise, but a fundamental position essential to the health of your daily physiology. Think of it more like drinking water than an “exercise.”

What would happen if you drank all your water for the week on Monday morning over at Gold’s Gym in a hard forty-five-minute hydration session? It wouldn’t look pretty is the answer, and it’s a similar story with the biological staple we call squatting. It’s best to wear pants or shorts that allow you to squat regularly and easily with full range of motion all the time. In fact, there was a time not too long ago that these two activities would often happen in tandem; e.g., squatting by a river or spring to gather water, and then drinking it (see just about any National Geographic documentary on indigenous peoples).

Squatting, lunging, and walking are some of the major players in moving fluids through your body. The majority of your organs do not have onboard muscles to function, but instead are dependent on pressure regulation from your movement to operate and keep you healthy. Squatting changes the pressure in your abdomen and circulates fluids that otherwise would be stagnant. This chain of pressure-based events takes place because your body is a closed hydraulic system.

What the heck does all that mean? Move one part of the body, and the effect ripples through the whole system like a tube of toothpaste when you squeeze the end. We are essentially an elaborate collection of pumps moving fluid from one compartment to the next. Our overall health is related to the level in which we move our internal fluids. The movement of our internal fluids is dependent on our ability to regularly move through a full range of motion (ROM), and our ROM is limited by the pants we wear!

The squat test involves nothing more than taking your legs through a healthy range of motion to be sure your pants don’t impede you from becoming a stronger, more flexible version of yourself.

From this point forward, before purchasing a new skirt, pair of pants, or shorts, see if you can squat in them. If you are limited in your ability to go through your full leg ROM with the pants you own, choose a different pair. If you wear clothes you can move in, you will move better and more!

FOOTWEAR (AND WHY IT MATTERS)

Your feet are the foundation for your body, and if any part of the feet is compromised, the whole system compensates, leading to imbalance and tension. In the practice of Rolfing Structural Integration, a form of manual therapy that systematically balances the body from foot to head, practitioners like me begin to “reorganize” the feet very early on when working with new clients. Why is this?

Let’s start by taking a brief anatomical glance at the foot. A quarter of the bones in the whole body are in the feet alone; that’s 26 bones, 33 joints, 117 ligaments, and 19 muscles per foot. With this knowledge, it seems fairly apparent that we’ve naturally evolved to have a wide variety of lower limb movement. For any folks who are into math, those thirty-three foot joints allow us 8.6 x 10³⁶ different foot positions, translating to a zillion options of motion. It almost feels criminal to shut down that beautiful potential by wearing excessively tight, rigid, or high heel–supported footwear. Our feet, like the rest of our body, are continually adapting to the environment we drop them in.

If we cram ourselves into a rigid environment, like when we consistently wear poor-fitting or restrictive shoes, our growth potential is stunted, and compensatory patterns echo throughout the body as a whole. Hopefully this provides new meaning the next time your local crystal-slinging “spiritual” person suggests, “It’s all connected.” If there’s one clothing article we should be examining diligently for structural health and longevity, shoes likely take the cake. Let’s take a look at a few relevant factors to observe in purchasing a shoe that supports ease, flexibility, strength, and comfort for your hounds. They work hard for you and deserve the best!

WIDE TOE BOX

Have you ever had the sensation of going on a vacation someplace warm and noticed your feet literally grow in size? Excluding the chance you were recently stung by a jellyfish, this is likely because your feet literally expand to their natural dimension when spending time walking barefoot or in open shoes on varied surfaces, like the beach, rocks, or grass. If the muscles of the feet are able to relax and find their own natural support, you start that same trend in the rest of the body. Try it now. Stand up and scrunch your feet against the ground. You will notice a contraction traveling up your legs, all way up to the back of your neck. Temporary contraction is a great thing. However, chronic contraction is a serious liability. If you maintain this scrunch for an extended period of time, you will notice the positive sensation of the contraction will fairly quickly turn into one of exhaustion and excess tension.

Your shoes should permit you to spread open your toes as wide as you can. Anything shy of full foot range of motion is similar to wearing a foot cast after an injury—with repeated use, they become more like foot coffins. After wearing the foot cast, you would need to go through months of rehabilitation to recover healthy range of motion and muscular support. An eerily high percentage of modern footwear has been “binding” our feet—to a lesser degree than during China’s Song Dynasty, but binding nonetheless. It’s both sad and fascinating to think that throughout history, beauty has somehow become conflated with pain.

ROLL IT UP

The Tarahumara tribe from Copper Canyon in northern Mexico, brought into the popular consciousness by Christopher McDougall’s book Born to Run, are some of the world’s most elite runners, and like most running tribes across the globe, they choose the simplest of foot protection. They find anything more supportive than sandals made from a thin piece of rubber tire impedes their ability to access their own natural movement mechanics. And these guys aren’t just going for a jog around the block—they routinely run dozens of miles across the Mexican desert.

When looking for a favorable shoe, the roll-up test is a good starting point. It should be fairly easy to roll the toe of the shoe up to touch the back. If not, you are likely outsourcing your own foot muscles and growing dependent on the support structure of the shoe, leading to muscular atrophy and a whole host of ankle, knee, hip, and back problems upstream. This is not a huge problem for a short time (like heels), but prolonged use of those shoes will weaken your feet, leading to a dependency on excessively supportive footwear.

DITCH THE HEELS (USUALLY)

It turns out ankle range of motion is not just a foot thing but a brain thing, too! Before you get your feathers ruffled, hear me out. Walking activates mechanoreceptors in the lower extremities, stimulating cerebello-thalamo-cortical loops in the brain (I’m not making that term up, I promise). The reduced cortical activity changes dopaminergic function, which is associated with the way you think and feel.¹ Wait, what? Yeah, my brain hurts from just typing that; essentially what it’s saying is that research shows you need to move your ankles for your brain to function optimally and your mental health to stay in check.

If you’re still thinking that a great new pair of shoes makes you happy enough to counteract the lack of ankle movement, how about we focus on something that about 80 percent of Americans will experience in their lifetime: back pain? Lifted-heel footwear props our body forward, and thus our low back becomes excessively curved to pull us back into alignment. This ripple of tension weasels its way up to the cervical spine (neck) to compensate for the newfound tension down the chain, leading to the fairly ubiquitous complaint of a “tight” neck. Contrary to the popular kids’ song, the ankle bone is actually connected to every other bone in the body, and its movement is associated with your production of neurochemistry (although for the sake of singing in class, it’d be sensible to stick the original version).

Preventing the heel from fully dropping as it would on any natural surface in bare feet adds a new variable of tension to the body that modern humans are struggling to cope with. A body held in this tensed and imbalanced position becomes a ticking time bomb waiting for some part to “pop” along the postural chain at a seemingly random moment. Was that pillow you were picking up extra heavy when you threw your back out that day, or have you been setting the stage for the injury to transpire for years with improper footwear and imbalanced movement patterns?

I would venture to say the physically deleterious effect of consistent high heel use (key word here is “consistent”—occasional use is no problem, as far as I can tell) is at least on par with that of the neck-lengthening traditions practiced in Asia we as foreigners would typically find to be outlandish. There, I said it. The good news is we can begin decompressing and unwinding our postural imbalances via self-care, better movement choices, and proper footwear.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HEELS

For the record, high heels are not some newfangled thing, but have been used as tools for literally thousands of years. Their functions have ranged from lifting ancient Egyptian butchers’ feet off the ground to avoid standing in the blood of animals, to a war tool for Persian soldiers on horseback to secure their feet in the stirrups while standing to shoot a bow, to elevating European aristocrats off the ground to avoid stepping in horse crap and to appear taller to denote more authority. In fact, the red high heel wasn’t popularized by the likes of Christian Louboutin, but originally were worn by men in the French court during the seventeenth century. King Louis XIV used red heels as an indication of those in royal favor, and no one could wear heels taller than his, which measured a whopping five inches tall! This all lasted until the great male renunciation, when male style shifted away from adornment and beauty toward utility.

I’ve included this brief, slightly ridiculous history of heels mainly because I found it super interesting. I’m not here to rain on anyone’s heel parade—I just want all the well-meaning people using them as the tool they are to know the risks of excessive use. If you’ve insulated yourself with enough healthy self-care and functional movement in other aspects of your life, I don’t see a problem with wearing heels for short periods of time (like less than an hour). That wasn’t easy for me to write, but I think the heel lovers out there needed to hear it, and we’ll both feel a lot better now that I’ve said it.

ALIGN YOUR SHIRTS: THE HANG TEST

Remember the squat test for your pants? This is like that but for your shirts. When buying a shirt or jacket (gentlemen) or any kind of women’s wear (ladies), reach up to touch a doorway to be sure the sleeves move with ease. If your clothing limits you in any way, you are setting yourself up for inflexibility and an aversion to play because you don’t want to rip your new article of what is hopefully organic fabric.

That’s right, organic fabric! Your skin absorbs the dyes and various chemicals used to create your clothing. The underlying costs of fast fashion are a topic for another book, but I implore you to take a deeper look into where your clothing comes from and choose companies based on their global impact whenever possible.

Alignment Assignment

I can hear critics stirring at the idea of converting to more minimalist footwear—this journey is not for the faint of heart. It’s a gradual process that takes time, and most people get themselves into trouble by jumping straight to minimalist shoes without foot training prior. Here’s a simple recipe to help rehabilitate domesticated feet.

1. Stand with your feet placed under your sit bones more often. Stacking your feet under your pelvic bones (ischial tuberosities) while standing will help naturally re-form the foot architecture to be more supportive instead of the collapsed pattern typical with many people. As you’re standing, you can alternate between gripping the ground with your toes and spreading them wide and lifting them off the ground for ten or so repetitions.

2. Barefoot practice on sand, rocks, logs, etc.

3. Take it slowly: Hang on to your old shoes, and split time between your old and new ones until your feet are strong enough to drop the support completely.

4. Tippy-toe walks: This is a great (and fun) way to re-strengthen your arches while working on balance at the same time. Focus on all the principles for aligned standing outlined in Chapter 6 while you raise yourself up on your tippy-toes. Emphasize the weight on the first and second toe, but feel all five firmly grounded to feel stable. You can raise your arms overhead and/or walk forward and backward for six steps, and remember to breathe!

CHAPTER 9

Clothing—If the Shoe Fits

TAKE THE SQUAT TEST