41. Be Body Aware

When we got our dog, Dancer, I knew I was about to start walking a lot more. I didn’t mind, I like to walk, and it was already somewhat of a habit of mine, so I was ready. My shoes weren’t though.

I’ve never seen a pair of shoes so worn out as the ones I walked Dancer in. However, they continued to get the job done until I realized that all my socks were getting holes in them. There was a hole right though my shoe, so going for a walk was wearing out my socks too. At that point, I threw those hearty Nikes away.

The 2 places where the shoe had worn through was in the heel and on the outside under the balls on my feet, opposite the foot arch. The reason I find this interesting is because I remember being 9 years old and training myself how I wanted to walk. More than 2 decades later, I still walk the same, as evidenced by where the holes were in my dog walking shoes.

I got terrible knee pain as a kid, and the diagnosis was that I had flat feet. Orthotics in my shoes and hockey skates was the solution, and knee pain hasn’t been a problem since. To this day, I wear orthotics when I play hockey, but I’ve never routinely worn orthotics in any shoes I’ve ever worn. The reason is because when I was 9 years old, I figured I could just learn to walk the way that the orthotics were meant to force me to.

The pain in my knee was bad enough that I was motivated to do anything to make it stop, so I trained myself to keep my body weight off my arches, even though that was against the innate tendency to collapse inward. I understood that if my foot pronated when I took a step, my knee was likely to follow suit and cave inward, which was causing me pain. So, I practiced walking with my body weight on the outside of my feet and keeping my knees perfectly straight.

The result is that I’m still hyper aware of what my feet and knees are doing whenever I walk, jog or run. I’m not saying I’ve never had any knee pain since, but I do know exactly how to pinpoint the root cause of any discomfort I might have in my knee or lower leg. Keep in mind, I figured this out 15 years before I ever had a degree in human kinetics, and that’s important to consider. We have to be aware of what’s happening in our bodies if our bodies are going to serve us throughout our lifetime, and this does not mean you need to be a pro in human anatomy and physiology.

What I’d like you to understand is that we’re not meant to be in pain, but so many of us are. Plenty of people have bad backs, bad shoulders, hip pain, elbow pain and everything in between. We spend time, energy and money trying to take care of our pain points because life is better without it. However, what we typically do to help our pain points is look outside ourselves to medical and health professionals. It’s a wonderful thing to do, and society is better with chiropractors, massage therapists and sports medicine experts, but just like when we look for reasons why we’re not reaching our financial goals, we need to start looking at ourselves and not anyone else to improve our pain points.