The Foot is an Engineering Masterpiece

The foot is a marvel of engineering design. Each foot has 26 bones, 100’s of ligaments, muscles and tendons. Many of these structures have to function alongside one another in a very precise way so that we can easily walk, run and do a whole range of actions. The foot is a perfectly tuned biomechanical work of art as it is required to co-ordinate all those physiological structures in order that it can function efficiently and without problems to carry out those activities. The foot did evolve to have those characteristics on a soft ground and not wearing shoes, so a number of imperfections probably crept in as feet was placed into footwear and it was forced to walk and run on the hard cement surfaces. Small imperfections which were not previously an issue did start to show up in those shoes and on those hard surfaces. It is this that is to blame for so many of the problems that podiatrists see in the foot these days.
As an example, one of those issues is a idea called supination resistance . This is viewed as the force that is needed to raise the arch of the foot. If that force is high, then the muscles and tendons need to work harder and the ligaments have a lot more strain on them. This may lead to pain in those structures as well as the development of a progressive flat foot. If that force is large, running and walking also requires more energy and could be very tireing. If that supination resistance force is too low, then it will probably be simple to raise the arch of the foot. This will result in more ankle sprains since it is really easy to tip the foot over to cause that. From this it ought to be clear that a fine balance is needed between excessive and too low amounts of this force which is a good illustration of just what an engineering masterpiece the foot is and just how easy it is for something to go bad.

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