Pronation, the root of all evil in sports

Eric Ward

©, Dec, 2008

If you are looking for the crystal ball that can predict which athletes might have “what it takes” to make it to the top levels in any sport. All you need to do is understand feet, how they create balance, and how to measure pronation accurately.

Truly, pronation is certainly not this simple, however, simply put, pronation is how the foot collapses, or rolls inwards, when the foot hits the ground and is weighted during any athletic movements. If you understand the importance of the split second that it takes to create balance, you would be able to better predict ones athletic success in any sport.

Firstly: we need to acknowledge the basics, that is athletic balance starts, and is maintained the moment we begin moving from foot to foot, not simply standing on two feet equally weighted. This idea demands that you understand one footed balance and its importance in the creating athletic movements. When a foot touches the ground there are many things that happen all at once. But, keeping things simple. All feet will collapse to a certain degree during the loading process. Once this collapse has begun, unconsciously muscles will be recruited, and will be fired to intervene and hold the bones in position to create dynamic balance. In this relationship there is a direct correlation between excessive unconscious muscle tension, and excessive structural pronation. This is often miss understood and basically manifests into un-athletic movement patterns, chronic vague pains, with symptoms appearing in ankles, knees, hips, and backs.

Because all athletics begin with balance, and balance begins with how the foot connects to the world. There is a direct correlation between excessive pronation, and poor dynamic balance. Since the universal common thread in all athletics is dynamic balance, this new understanding of feet, pronation, muscle tension, proprioception, and over all balance can be used to make athletes better quite easily. Effectively, leveling the playing field for all athletes, in any sport.

It turns out that in my more than 10 years of testing the best athletes have two things in common.

1. They all seem to pronate less than 2.5 degrees.

2. The all seem to pronate very symmetrically.

I am talking about the top ten percent of high-level athletes in all sports fall into this spectrum somewhere. Where do your athletes land on this chart?

My personal definition of “athleticism” is, “the one who can create the greatest amount of power, with the least amount of effort”. Implying that there is an ability to retain some amount of relaxation during great athletic movements. Examples are Tiger Woods, Michael Jordon, Bode Mille, etc. Some refer to this ability as “spare capacity”

In any athletic activity the foot connects with the ground, and creates balance in a split second. It requires a certain amount of unconscious muscle tension to create and maintain this balance. Lets say for this discussion that athlete #1 needs to use 20% of the available muscle capacity to create and maintain balance. This would mean that, the spare capacity, or what is left over would be 80% to create conscious athletic movements with. This seems like a fairly efficient distribution of power, and mental capacity. Now, lets say that another person playing the same sport with the same athletic intelligence, requires 40% of their muscular capacity to create balance, and is only left with 60% to distribute into conscious athletic activity. It makes perfect sense that this person would wear out faster, be more prone to injury, complain of pain sooner, and will basically just be less athletic. What if you could take the second athlete and provide the same muscular demands and percentages as the first? The Foot Foundation is helping people do exactly that by educating them to think very differently about how feet work and how to work with feet.

About Feet, the Romans taught us many important things that have been re-proven over time. One lesson that we can clearly apply to feet, but we seem to forget, an arch by definition is; “a self-supporting structure”. So if we think about the structural components of the foot we are basically looking at 3 interconnected arches or a tripod. When you add muscles and soft tissue it could more accurately be described as a “spring loaded tripod”. (Important note, this is true with “normal healthy feet” only). Engineers design and build bridges, and quite large buildings using arch shapes because of their immense strength.

So: If arches are “self-supporting”, then the term “arch support” would be an oxymoron?

Somehow we have all been sold the idea that supporting the arch of the foot is needed to stop this collapsing. In truth, anyone with a flat foot can tell you that arch supports do one thing for sure, that is create arch cramps. I don’t want to say that ach support is not helpful. It does create a much more comfortable connection to the shoe or boot. And does distribute the pressures along the entire foot structure. However a normal ach support while it does fill up the arch space, it doesn’t actually change how much you pronate. Think about this if you were to stand beneath a stone archway and pushed upwards it would compromise the arches structural integrity and would fall on your head. An arch support that is too aggressive will do the same thing to a foot. I was shocked to find that during dynamic testing the vast majority of people experience better balance without foot beds than with. This is due to fact that allowing the foot to load naturally, and allowing the foot structure to stay in its “normal” skeletal alignment. Provides a much more complete proprioceptive connection to the surface of the earth. This allows the brain to listen more carefully and provide more accurate muscular responses in the balancing efforts. So solving the collapsing foot problem simply might require some new thinking.

Where we find pronation there also exists its alter ego, supination. This is the opposite movement of the foot toward the outside. Most people that have visited a foot expert have been told that they are one or the other either “pronators” or “supinators”. Well, the truth could be that while in dynamic balance we use both pronation and supination movements to create and sustain balance. What I want people to understand is that pronation and supination have different functions. Pronation is structural movemtent, the bones simply falling in during loading, and supination, is a muscular movement responding to the structural collapse. This is key to the dynamic relationship and is absolutely critical to understand to make any sense of balance. For every degree of structural collapse, there is a corresponding amount of muscular tension that moves the foot in the opposite direction.

The point of all this…? If a foot is consistently pre programmed to collapse, muscles will be recruited, and will be required to work overtime to hold up the collapsing foot. This creates a muscularly ridged foot, ankle, knee, hip, back. This tension and some very disruptive rotational byproducts will travel up the kinetic chain affecting muscles all the way up the body, every step of the way. The overall effect of this situation could be witnessed by the most common chronic mistakes in your sport, and also could be leading to the most common injuries in your sport.

Imagine this chain of events happening in…

A Pitch A Tennis Serve A Put

A sprint A Drive Skiing

Kicking a ball Weight lifting A Squat

Tackling Curling A Set

Batting Being a Goalie

or any athletic activity you can think of.

It turns out that often, athletes are only as good as there feet; the rest boils down to factors like athletic intelligence, determination, coordination, passion for their sport etc. You can coach the physical, emotional, and intellectual parts of the game, however the foot will remain the same. Having a new understanding how the foot loads, or pronates for all your athletes can create a much more level playing field. This allows any sport to be played at a higher level by all. Not just the “Naturally Gifted” athletes. Fill the gaps in the field with newfound talent in the team you have now, on the bench, not the team you wish you had.

Yes this is interesting but is only a window to the ballpark of athletics. Obviously there have been many athletes that enjoy great success with far more pronation than is optimal, these are the people with the chronic pains in the knees, shin splints, stress fractures, ACL injuries, back spasms, the list goes on. So it is not just to improve performance, which is one great reason for a closer look at all those feet, but also preventing injury and debilitating chronic pain that is often “the straw” that ends most athletic careers. How many almost made it’s are out there who, had they had a coach that was on the ball, and could help them understand how there feet affected not only their performance, but also their safety, would be in an entirely different place today.

In conclusion, most things we do athletically are the biomechanical byproduct of how well your feet work. Like cars, our bodies are often out of alignment. Remember, the first link in the kinetic chain turns out to be the foot connecting itself to the ground. This important relationship is critical to understand how the foot creates balance, the most important ingredient of all sports.

The Foot Foundation has developed a process that measures pronation, and makes the balancing process more efficient in any sport. SBS® or (Sports Balance System). Dynamic measuring is the twist in this new approach. Our patented “dynamic one footed, pronation measuring process is unique and provides a new answer to the conventional wisdom. Trying to use feet to improve balance, is our mission. This innovation in understanding feet, pronation, orthotics, and basic balance will change everything. Understanding balance, and the measurements produced, by the SBS® program provide a new and very useful perspective for coaches with athletes that may be making the same fundamental mistakes chronicly, and may ultimately be risking their safety. Visit us at www.footfoundation.com to get more info on how you could use the SBS® process with your team.