Foot: The Lot of You — My Relationship with the Foot and the Industry

Before anatomy pulled me in, my foot was the thing I kicked balls with and my ankle was the bobbly bit that held it on. As a kid I twisted that ankle constantly, bandaged it and carried on, because nothing stopped me playing football. This is the story of how the foot turned me into an "expert", and how the evidence eventually turned me back into an honest one.

How I became a foot expert

In my degree and my early years in the industry, the only attention I paid to the lower leg was trying to help people grow calves as big as mine. Then, in 2003, I met Gary Gray and his co-lecturer Dr Dave Tiberio. They made a compelling case — that human movement is a chain reaction most often starting at the foot — and they sold a story of being outcast by the physical therapy establishment. I bought it hook, line and sinker. Being a rebel who was going to change the industry had exactly the rock'n'roll attitude I was after.

They put importance on the foot before anyone else I'd seen, and the claims were seductive:

• Postural alignment is vital to reduce injury and pain, and the foot and ankle are the most critical part.
• An asymmetrical gait reveals current and future injuries.
• Symmetrical dynamic alignment produces better performance.
• The foot is the key to motion all the way up to the shoulders.
• Heel striking comes from shoes and is harmful.
• Dysfunctional feet can exist without pain, and optimal foot mobility is measurable.

The foot is amazingly complicated, yet it lets you become "the expert" fast — mainly because no one else takes the time to learn it. I had enough detail to blow people away. I felt great.

When the research stopped agreeing with me

By 2012, teaching this material, I started to see the cracks. When I actually filtered the research properly — the quality of the journal, the sample size, whether the subjects were human, whether the result was statistically significant and actually relevant to the claim — the evidence was doubtful or outright contradictory on the things I believed:

• Trigger pointing for foot mobility and pain relief.
• Hands-on techniques for foot mobility.
• Correcting foot alignment through orthotics.
• Reducing pain "through the chain" from the foot.
• Choosing shoes to relieve symptoms and improve performance.

None of it was proven. It leaned on case study and anecdote. The detail I'd learned had let me hide my lack of real knowledge, even from myself.

Watch out for the marketing trick behind a lot of this — the "good science vs bad science" framing. One barefoot-education company wrote that their results came from "real, objective, proven science by working on ourselves and patients we treat," not "the kind that you read in a journal." That statement is everything wrong with my industry in a nutshell: genuine belief that hands-on anecdote outranks universities that study movement, injury and rehabilitation.

The dilemma, and the way out

I'd built a reputation on this. My clients loved my magic hands and my students wanted to be me. Do you go with what's right and risk alienating friends who were taping, scraping and trigger-pointing for short-term gains? Or stay quiet and keep earning? The fear of loss made me want to hold on.

Around then the biopsychosocial model was being discussed — the idea that the biomedical model I relied on was wrong. The biomedical model treats the body as a machine of structures and chemicals to be corrected; it removes emotion. The biopsychosocial model describes how biological, psychological and social factors all shape a person's pain and injury. It was explained so badly at the time that I avoided reading it — and plenty of experts from massage, fascial and structural backgrounds still misunderstand it today, which is exactly why they're the loudest critics.

To dodge the whole mess, I threw myself into a new course, Neural Notching, focused on skill and performance rather than injury and pain. Reading that research turned my reasons for using certain techniques upside down — and it set my students up to make a real difference. One student, Ollie, credits it with moving from a £30 trainer to a £120 trainer in three years.

What I teach now

I seriously considered leaving the industry. Instead, on the back of my best students, I decided to drag FASTER back to the front and tell the truth: the foot is great and you should know it, but let's cut the crap. The foot was never really the point — it was the MacGuffin that led me to the research and the skills that actually matter.

To be a great trainer or therapist, using science, you need to give the client what they want, the way they want it. That takes real skills:

• Questioning skills — finding the right questions to ask, not the ones gurus and equipment companies plant.
• Research skills — finding, reading and judging the balance of good research.
• Communication skills — using environment, distance, tempo, word choice, tone and delivery to shift a client's emotion, and burying your protective ego to do it.
• Biomechanical analysis — seeing and predicting motion, then working with what you didn't expect.
• Exercise design for performance and skill — knowing the techniques, when to go hands-on and hands-off, and how to use training tools to magnify results.
• Storytelling — building programmes, content and social media in a way that moves emotion and makes your point precisely.

I don't have all the answers on the foot or anything else. But I have a way of teaching that gives you the confidence to be yourself and help clients in a way that follows the research and stays with them. If you want the evidence behind any claim here, email me at John@fasterglobal.com — I'm happy to help.