Part 1 followed how the foot collapses and locks within a single step: 26 bones, the alternation of hinge and spiral, three arches. But as that piece said at the end, the muscles that lift the arches are not in the foot. When you walk, what moves the foot is not the foot.
The muscles in the foot are not the ones moving it
There are muscles in the sole. They lie in three layers, crossing short distances, holding the arches up from below. They are called the intrinsic muscles — the muscles that live inside the foot.
The hand has the same thing. The pad at the base of the thumb, the pad along the little finger, the fine muscles between the fingers. They begin and end within the hand, and they work when the fingers do something delicate. The intrinsics of the foot occupy the same position.
What they do, though, is hold a shape. The bending, the straightening, the pressing into the floor that happens with every step — that is other muscles.
All of those are in the lower leg: the stretch from knee to ankle, shin and calf.
Two bones run through it, the tibia and the fibula. The tibia is the thick one you can touch from the front, and it carries the weight. The fibula is the slender one on the outside, carrying almost none.
On those two, the muscles that move the foot are arranged.
Tibialis anterior begins just lateral to the tibia. Peroneus longus begins at the head of the fibula. Tibialis posterior begins at the deepest place in the lower leg, behind the interosseous membrane — the sheet stretched between tibia and fibula, wrapping both bones in a single piece. Gastrocnemius and soleus begin around the back of the knee; those two are what make the swell of the calf.
Every one of them crosses the ankle and comes down into the foot as a long tendon. A tendon is what the end of a muscle becomes when it turns into a narrow, tough cord — the hard white strand left over when you eat a chicken wing. The fleshy part of the muscle stays in the lower leg. Only tendon reaches the foot.
The reason is simple: you cannot walk unless the foot is light. Every step swings the foot forward. If large muscles were packed inside it, that weight would have to be carried each time. So the engine sits in the lower leg, and only wire runs down to the foot.
What is actually being swung forward, step after step, is an assembly of bone, tendon, and skin. The muscles doing the swinging are not riding on the thing being swung.
Ida Rolf’s words name this structure exactly.
Don’t change the foot on the foot. Get the muscles of the leg so organized that they can change the foot.
Flat shins
Here again is the line quoted in Part 1.
Flat feet are not flat feet. They are flat shins. If you really know the anatomy of the shin and the retinaculum, you should have no problem with the flat feet.
The retinaculum is the word to pick up. It is a kind of belt, holding the tendons down where they cross the ankle.
Coming from the lower leg into the foot, tendons change direction at the ankle. Left to themselves, they would bowstring away from the bone the moment force came through them. The retinaculum presses them down and keeps them running along the bone.
The wrist has the same thing: a band across the inside, holding down the tendons that flex the fingers as a group. Grip hard and the tendons still do not lift off the wrist, because that band is there. At the ankle, the job is no different.
From here come the words for the movements of the ankle. Reading gait depends on them, so it is worth sorting them out first.
The ankle has two pairs of movements.
The first is the toes going up and down. Drawing the toes up toward the shin is dorsiflexion — the shape of standing on your heels. Pointing them down is plantarflexion — rising onto the toes, or pressing the accelerator of a car.
In walking, those two trade places within a single step. Just before the heel touches the floor, the toes are up: dorsiflexion. As weight passes forward and the foot pushes off, the toes point down: plantarflexion.
The second pair is the sole changing which way it faces. Turning the sole inward is inversion; turning it outward is eversion.
Inversion is also what happens when you sprain an ankle. Missing a step and hurting the outside of the ankle is inversion gone too far.
These two also trade places within a step. From the moment the heel touches until weight has come fully onto the foot, the foot moves somewhat toward eversion — this is the collapsing of the arch described in Part 1. From there, heading into push-off, the foot travels back toward inversion, and the arch locks.
And what decides all four movements is the retinaculum.
Because of it, the same muscle does one thing or another depending on where its tendon passes. In front of the ankle, it bends the ankle; behind, it extends it. On the inside, inversion; on the outside, eversion.
Myers lays this out with a chart of the ankle tendons. Looking down at the ankle from above, everything to the left of the line dividing inversion from eversion is involved in inversion, and everything to the right is involved in eversion. Everything in front of the line dividing dorsiflexion from plantarflexion is a dorsiflexor; everything behind it is a plantarflexor.
Look down at the ankle and draw two lines, one running front to back, one side to side. Which side of a line the tendon passes on is what determines what that muscle does. Not a property of the muscle itself — the position of the path it takes.
Something interesting falls out of this. Tibialis anterior and tibialis posterior are exact opposites when it comes to bending or extending the ankle. But for inversion they lie on the same side of the line. Which is to say, they work together.
Muscles that work in opposition are antagonists; muscles that work in the same direction are synergists. Facing each other across a tug-of-war rope, they are antagonists; standing on the same side and pulling together, synergists.
The same two muscles are antagonists or synergists depending on which axis you look along. As you walk, those two are working through changing relationships, phase by phase — facing each other, then standing side by side, over and over within a single step.
And a fallen arch, seen through the retinaculum, becomes a state in which the path a tendon takes has changed. Not a problem with the shape of the bone. A problem with the route.
As long as flat feet are treated as a problem with the shape of the foot, the search stays inside the foot. Treated as a problem of routing, the search moves to the shin.
The stirrup under the foot
Of the tendons coming down from the lower leg, two have a particular shape.
Tibialis anterior descends from the outside of the tibia, passes in front of the ankle, and curls around to the inside of the foot, attaching between the medial cuneiform and the first metatarsal. The cuneiforms are the three wedge-shaped bones above the instep. The metatarsals are the five long bones that make the top of the foot.
Peroneus longus descends from the head of the fibula, wraps behind the outer ankle bone, and dives beneath the sole. Under the cuboid there is a groove carved into the bone for this tendon to run through. The cuboid is the die-shaped bone in the middle of the outer edge of the foot. Through that groove the tendon crosses the foot and attaches in almost the same place as tibialis anterior.
A tendon that came from the outside attaches on the inside; one that came from the inside crosses to the outside. The two cross beneath the foot and form a single continuous band.
Myers calls this a stirrup — the shape you put a foot into on horseback. Both ends are anchored in the lower leg, and the middle passes under the sole.
In walking, the stirrup works. Peroneus longus lifts the cuboid from beneath, supporting the lateral arch. Tibialis anterior lifts the inside. Between the pull of the two, weight rolls through while the arches hold.
As weight travels from the heel along the outside and across to the ball of the big toe, the foot is collapsing and being suspended from beneath at the same time. What keeps it from collapsing all the way is this band, pulling from the lower leg.
There is a third: tibialis posterior. It begins behind the interosseous membrane, the deepest place in the lower leg, wraps behind the inner ankle bone, and grabs nearly everything it can reach under the sole — the navicular, the cuneiforms, the metatarsals. The navicular sits at the highest point of the instep; touch just in front of the inner ankle bone and you can feel it as a bump. The muscle attaches the way a hand slid under the foot would take hold and lift.
Myers describes what tibialis posterior and peroneus longus do for the arches as a kind of fireman’s carry. A hold coming from the inside and a hold coming from the outside combine, and the arches are taken up from below.
The spiral carries on to the knee
Part 1 said that the subtalar joint traces a spiral — the joint between the heel bone and the talus that rides on top of it. On landing, that spiral turns shock into rotation and lets it out.
Rotation here means a bone twisting around its own long axis. Hold the handle of an umbrella and turn your wrist, and the handle turns around its axis. That movement.
The rotation does not stop at the ankle.
When the subtalar joint inverts and everts, the lower leg above it rotates. Tibia and fibula are bound by the interosseous membrane, so their relationship changes too: two bones joined by a single sheet, one moving and the other following. And the rotation travels on up, to the knee and the hip.
With every step, the whole leg twists and untwists. Inward on landing, back outward on push-off. It looks as though you walk with the leg straight, but the whole leg is describing a spiral.
What is visible from outside is only the leg swinging forward and back. What is happening inside is a twist and its return.
And here something interesting occurs.
How the knee appears as a joint changes with the point of view.
Seen from the foot and lower leg, the knee is a hinge. It bends or it straightens, and nothing else. In the second Rolfing session it is treated exactly that way: with the client’s knee lightly bent, you check whether the hinges of leg and foot are moving supplely together.
By the fourth session, the knee is treated as a diaphragm — a plane crossing the body. The freedom of the joint capsule, the order of the pes anserinus. The capsule is the sac enclosing the joint, holding lubricating fluid inside. The pes anserinus is the place on the inner knee where three tendons from the thigh line up and attach to bone; the arrangement resembles a goose’s webbed foot, which is where the name comes from. The question is no longer whether it hinges, but whether the body is divided into above and below at that plane.
The same joint appears as a different thing depending on the height of the view. From ankle to knee, from knee to pelvis, the character of the joint itself changes as the point of view rises.
The pelvis as a horizontal
So where is this chain headed?
Ida Rolf again.
All work below the pelvis is to make a horizontal base for the pelvis. All work above the pelvis is to lift and lighten the load on the pelvis.
Working with the foot, working with the lower leg — both are for the sake of the pelvis.
In the context of walking, a level pelvis means this. Every step brings a moment when one leg alone carries the weight. If the pelvis drops toward the unsupported side, the upper body tilts to make up for it. If the pelvis holds level, the upper body has nothing to do.
It is like suspending a balance beam from one side. If the weight gathers directly beneath the point of suspension, the beam does not tilt. Off to one side, and something has to go on the other end to even it out. In walking, what takes on the job of being that something is the upper body.
Whether support arrives from below decides how much work the upper body has to do.
And there is one more line, about the second session.
In the first hour you are balancing the back. In hour two you are taking those long back muscles and putting them in position so they can extend.
The work is on the foot, and the subject turns out to be the back. Waking the feet and feeding the back is how Giovanni’s materials describe the theme of the second session.
Brought back to walking, it comes out like this. If the foot cannot receive force from the floor, the back takes the job over, and you walk while holding yourself up with your back. Once the foot begins to work, the back is released from lifting and can lengthen.
The landing foot and the pushing foot
How does all this structure show up in walking?
While you walk, the two feet are doing different jobs.
One is landing. The heel reaches forward and meets the floor. From there it receives weight, and the arch collapses and lets the shock out. The phase begins in dorsiflexion and travels toward eversion.
The other is pushing off. The toes become hinges and press the floor. The arch locks and force gathers into one direction. The phase travels back toward inversion and ends in plantarflexion.
With every step, the roles trade.
Watch them separately.
For the landing foot: how far forward does the heel reach, and how does it meet the floor at the moment it arrives?
For the pushing foot: are the joints of the toes working? Does weight reach the big toe? If it does not get that far, the last of the push drains away.
And is the talocrural joint doing both gliding and rolling? The talocrural joint is where tibia and fibula grip the talus from above — the place generally called the ankle.
Gliding and rolling describe how the surfaces of a joint move. Rolling is what a wheel does along a road. But rolling alone would carry the upper bone too far forward, out toward leaving the joint. So the surfaces glide slightly at the same time, putting the position back.
In walking, while weight passes over the foot, the tibia travels forward over the talus, and both rolling and gliding are happening. If either is missing, the ankle jams partway. Jammed, weight cannot pass forward; it stops, and the push-off beyond it goes shallow.
Stride length. Does the heel stay on the floor for a while, or does it spring up? Is there time in which the toes press? Is there time in which the foot rolls?
Whether each phase gets as much time as it needs. Where a phase is short of time, the work of that phase gets skipped.
What it means to touch the ground
So far this has been structure. To close, what it means for the person doing the walking.
In Rolfing training, what to follow after the second session is set out: what the contact with the ground has come to mean.
Landing. Trust. Letting go. Pushing off. Rising. Reaching.
These stand as the language of observation. Can weight be given to the ground? Can it be pushed off from? Can something lengthen upward? Is there a sense of reaching toward something?
Getting the ground back under you is the sum of all of these. For the foot to be able to touch the ground is also for the ground to become something that can be trusted.
Walking is a run of single-leg stances. Every step gives the whole weight to one foot. If it cannot be given, the stride shortens: the next foot goes out in a hurry, cutting short the time weight spends on the ground.
A change in the way someone walks is also a change in the way they hand over that weight.
There is a caution for the practitioner as well. While working with the foot, keep the exchange with the client going. And do not give too much information.
The foot is a sensitive place. Many people are not used to being touched there. The work needs to proceed with both people checking what is happening — and yet, with too much explanation, the feeling itself moves to the back.
Where this goes next
Part 2 has raised the point of view from the foot to the lower leg and on to the pelvis.
What moves the foot turned out to be the lower leg, not the foot. So what moves the lower leg and the pelvis?
When they walk, most people feel that the leg starts at the hip — that everything below the belt of the trousers is leg.
Look inside the body, though, and the muscle carrying the leg forward comes from higher up.
Part 3 takes that up.
The series
- Part 1: The Foot Changes Shape With Every Step — How the Arches Are Made
- Part 2: The Problem in the Foot Is Not in the Foot — From the Lower Leg to the Pelvis (this article)
- Part 3: The Leg Begins Below the Ribs — The Psoas and the Diagonal
- Part 4: Reading Gait Through Gravity — Tonic Function and Palintonicity
References
Thomas Myers, “The Foot: Understanding the Arches,” Massage Magazine, September/October 1997.