If you have flat feet, it may be your weak gluts!

There can be many factors to give you flat feet but one of them could be weak gluts. To prove how this works you can do a quick test. Stand on your feet and flatten your arches onto the floor. Put your fingers on your gluteus medius muscle just above your hips (the middle muscle pictured below). Then raise your arches but keep your toes and heels on the floor. You should be able to feel your gluteus medius turn on.

What this implies that you can change the arches of your foot just by strengthening your gluts. Here are some examples of what conditions people may have to cause or contribute to by their flat feet.

Pregnancy can change the size of your feet. Besides your hormones, weak gluts can be one of the factors that is flattening your arch which makes your foot longer. Gluts can weaken by how you walk and when heavily pregnant people certainly can change their walking pattern which relatively turns off the gluts.

Another example, is if you are trying to treat your bunions (the extra bone that sticks out of the side of the base of your big toe) increasing your arches could also stop the bunions from progressing.

The principle is similar in that by strengthening your gluts, you are able to raise your arches in order to make your big toe point straighter ahead. The stress moves away from the area of your bunion to stop your body to create more bone (the bunion) as a reaction to the stress.

Are you using orthotics for your flat feet? There are some streams of thought that orthotics are more like crutches. We are meant to use them temporarily while we heal our body (strengthening our gluts) so that we can come off them. If we can have a more supported arch we may not need orthotics anymore. Our feet can learn how to move and take on load without them.

If you want to know more about how to strengthen your gluts or work out what is required to treat your flat arches, make a booking with Inspired Physiotherapy.