![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberettI have been met with surprise from A and others recently, when pointing this out, so it gets to go here too:
In theory, when you are standing and indeed walking (or even cycling), you want your knees and your toes to be pointing in more or less the same direction, with your kneecap approximately in line with your second toe.
Doing this -- keeping your knee still, and rotating your foot around your ankle (yaw and roll are the relevant axes) -- activates the muscles of the arch of your foot, in ways that I at least find surprising and discombobulating, but which also make it actually possible for bits of my anatomy other than my joints to act as shock absorbers.
The thing with my particular flavour of bendy is, it's much less work to just let my toes drift outward and my arches flatten and my knees go back -- to let my joints take the strain, instead of activating my muscles and having them stabilise and shock-absorb and such. It's what I do automatically! It doesn't require me to pay attention! ... and it puts a lot more wear and stress on my joints and my muscles decondition and doing less work in the moment makes me hurt more over time.
So. Yes. Toes forward. Arch muscles engage. Isn't it weird.
In theory, when you are standing and indeed walking (or even cycling), you want your knees and your toes to be pointing in more or less the same direction, with your kneecap approximately in line with your second toe.
Doing this -- keeping your knee still, and rotating your foot around your ankle (yaw and roll are the relevant axes) -- activates the muscles of the arch of your foot, in ways that I at least find surprising and discombobulating, but which also make it actually possible for bits of my anatomy other than my joints to act as shock absorbers.
The thing with my particular flavour of bendy is, it's much less work to just let my toes drift outward and my arches flatten and my knees go back -- to let my joints take the strain, instead of activating my muscles and having them stabilise and shock-absorb and such. It's what I do automatically! It doesn't require me to pay attention! ... and it puts a lot more wear and stress on my joints and my muscles decondition and doing less work in the moment makes me hurt more over time.
So. Yes. Toes forward. Arch muscles engage. Isn't it weird.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-05-21 12:53 pm (UTC)For my particular flavour of bendy, that rotation tends to deliver a distinct clunk which I suspect is something subluxing and reseating itself, at times on every rotation.
*noddy nod* it's a physical lock rather than an active muscular 'lock', that's really more of a continuously varying movement about the theoretical straight-legged / balanced position. Think of a Segway that's on and actively balancing on its two wheels vs off and resting against the wall.
You occasionally see people who've completely destroyed their normal knee ROM by repeately hyper-extending it that way, mostly due to post-polio, but I've seen one or two people who were so clearly Marfanoid in appearance that it was likely hypermobility.
Because my bendiness is worst in my hips, I've a tendency to walk stiff-legged and slightly on my toes, which minimises hip movement, but does tend to keep everything pointing in a line, but also means I need to be careful of hyper-extending.
(And if things are really bad I've occasionally caught myself rotating foot and knee 90 degrees off centre-line, taking both joints out of the equation in favour of a sort of peg-legged rocking over my heel. This is really not good as it's stressing the joints at 90 degrees to the way they're meant to take loads).