Feet First

If you want your yoga to build strong, stable, balanced legs, it's important to work the feet properly—even when you're not standing on them.

By Julie Gudmestad

If you're like most people who grew up in the West, you were taught at a young age to ignore your feet—to just stuff them into shoes and forget about them. As a child, you learned to run, jump, and play with your feet encased in rubber and leather. You probably paid little attention to them unless they hurt—after all, beyond the toddler years, it's definitely not OK to play with your feet in public. So it can be quite a surprise in your first yoga classes when you're asked to take off your shoes and socks and start paying serious attention to your feet. You may discover it's not so easy to do the seemingly simple actions your teacher suggests, like balancing your weight evenly on the inner and outer edges of your foot or lifting your arches. And how in the world do you get your toes to spread?

In those first yoga classes, you probably began your work with the feet while you were standing on them. In Tadasana (Mountain Pose) and other standing poses, like Trikonasana (Triangle Pose) and Virabhadrasana II (Warrior Pose II), you learned that the feet form the foundation of the pose. And as you progressed in those postures, the muscles of your feet and lower legs may have begun to regain the strength and control they'd lost during all those years of shoe wearing. There's a good chance, however, that as you expanded your repertoire beyond the standing poses, you fell into a habit I often observe in many of my students: forgetting about the feet again.

Find Your Footing
When I look at a group of students doing an inversion, with their legs reaching into the sky instead of down into the earth, I frequently see feet that look tired, as though the energy of the pose isn't quite reaching them. When students sit on the floor in forward bends, they tend to let their legs roll out and the soles of their feet turn a bit toward each other. And when a student comes into a one-legged balance like Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose) or Virabhadrasana III (Warrior Pose III), too often the foot hangs at the end of the lifted leg like a wilted lettuce leaf.

To learn how to properly activate the feet in these poses (and many others), it helps to understand the four basic foot and ankle movements that are most important in yoga, whether the feet are bearing weight or not. You can experience these movements while either sitting or standing, and you may want to practice each one a few times in both positions so you learn to associate the name with the movement. To explain the last two movements simply, I'll use vernacular terms that refer to a combination of actions performed by the foot and ankle.

PLANTAR FLEXION of the ankle occurs when you stand on your tiptoes. If you're sitting with your legs out in front of you, plantar flexion of the ankle happens when you point your toes.

DORSIFLEXION occurs when you stand on your heels with the balls of the feet lifted off the floor. If you're sitting, dorsiflexion happens when you push your heels away from you and pull your toes toward you.

SUPINATION occurs when you stand with your weight rolled onto the outer edges of your feet, lifting the arches and the base of the big toe. Non-weight-bearing supination happens when you sit with your legs out in front of you and turn the soles of the feet so they start to face each other.

PRONATION occurs when you lift the outer edges of your feet as you stand, collapsing your arches. In sitting postures, pronation occurs when you press out through your inner heels and the bases of your big toes.

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