Spotlight On:
MBT Shoes and Hip and Knee Surgery
‘Regular’ stable shoes, with the traditional heel area and ball of foot ‘push-off’ point, in combination with man-made even surfaces allow the body to be passive and slouched, but the toes overactive. The slight to obvious forward stance you end up adopting (and I mean everyone! Pre-MBTs of course) disengages the power/postural muscles of the buttocks and the back of the thigh, so the feet have all the work to do in sending you forward. The heel strikes the ground, grabs it and drags the rest of the body over the foot with the toes having the final job of pushing you further onwards. Poor feet! Without shoes, the great big heel bone would be horribly bruised and because of shoes, those tiny tiny muscles governing the action of the toes are over-burdened on a daily and massive scale.
We were cleverly designed to be able to walk unshod on natural surfaces, which is a balancing act. Balancing on uneven ground automatically engages the postural muscles – deep mid-foot muscles, calves, back of thigh, buttocks, pelvic floor, abdominals and either side of the spine. Most notably, a particular buttock muscle outwardly rotates the thigh bone in the hip socket, so the leg falls away from the body in a neutral line and the hamstrings (back of thigh) and the buttocks together form your powerful engine for forward motion. Far from dragging ourselves forward with our feet, we are designed to push ourselves forward using some of the biggest muscle groups in the body.
The use of that particular buttock muscle when balancing (the gluteus medius muscle), aligns the leg correctly so that all the joint articulations from the hip are true. The head of the thigh bone rotates in the hip socket without any bone-on-bone grinding, and the knee joint, a simple hinge joint, follows suit. The more complicated ankle joint should be stabilized with the continual balancing act – much like a ‘wobble board’ would teach you to do if you had to have physiotherapy for injury or surgery.
With hip and knee replacement surgery, the worn-down joint is replaced – one of the wonders of modern science – but the compromised gait that contributed to the wearing down in the first place will continue, because of the nature of the type of shoe we have been forced to wear through lack of other choice and the man-made surfaces we continually walk upon. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of uneven gait and wearing joints, and the only real solution is to use the body as it was designed to be used. They say human bodies are designed to fully function for 146 years – joint replacements are now being performed on 30 year olds!
Wearing MBT shoes before or after hip and/or knee surgery, whether for joint replacement or otherwise, re-creates the natural uneven ground our feet are designed to walk upon. MBTs are not internally cushioned (although they ‘feel’ superbly so), padded or supportive. The inner sole is completely flat, so it is as if your foot was bare. When wearing MBT shoes, when standing or moving, you are balancing – you have no choice. Muscles that should have been doing the job of propelling you forward your entire life, will automatically kick in – even if they are surprised at being told to! You discover the relaxed, effortless pleasure of pushing the body onward using the mainly posterior, postural muscles, and due to the unsmothered feedback from the many sensory nerve endings in the soles of your feet, you realize how relaxed they should be, and how overworked they had become. Joints are correctly aligned, rotate more smoothly and feel more comfortable.
The rule of thumb is don’t introduce change, however positive, too quickly. The human body does not like change – it finds it stressful– it is proven that even going on holiday is a form of stress – so gait and postural improvement also should come gradually. And this we teach at Ten-Point.
