Exercise your FEET!

PaleoJays Smoothie Cafe

In this time of coronavirus alarm, lawless rioting, looting, and rampant mindless destruction, sometimes we have to be- well, more grounded. Hopefully you, like me, have found a safe, rural tribal homeland within your own country that is safe and civilized.

If so, you are necessary in a rural area, far from large, modern, lawless and Democrat run cities! Congratulations, paleo friend. This is job #1 for you and your family. Safety and wellness always come first, and that means caring for your own health and wellness. Good, ancestral types of food, fresh air, uncontaminated non-chlorine soaked city drinking water, and a daily paleo smoothie are essential. So too is good, natural exercise done daily, including stretching, self-resisted exercise, virtual resistance, and isometrics. But what else is absolutely essential?

Foot health! Every time you put on a pair of shoes or boots, you are putting your feet into a cast. We tend to think of our feet as simple bases, as kind of inert blocks that just shuffle over the earth, grass and concrete alike. Nothing could be farther from the truth!

Your feet are very like your hands- covered with subtle feelings and receptors that govern how you react as your body covers various terrain. Your bare foot guides how you stand and move, enabling you to react to signals from them as to how you should lean, and your posture, to be both maximally efficient, and keeping you from injury as you travel across the landscape.

Most modern people have very weak, stunted feet; from being stuffed into shoe/casts daily, day after day. If your arm or leg goes into a cast, why everyone knows that that limb withers and shrinks dramatically after even a few weeks so confined.

The same is true of your feet. And not just your feet: the feet are what determines your entire chain, from foot, to ankle, to knee, to hip, to lower back- even up to the neck and head! Bad quality, out-of-shape feet can cause pain in not only the feet, but in the knees, hips, and back. They can even cause neck pain and headaches! Really, healthy feet are that important.

This is the perfect time of year to regain and build great foot health and strength! The very best thing you can do is to walk around barefoot. I walk my grass, and my dirt paths in the forest daily. In early spring, my feet are very tender to things like twigs and roots; but after a month or so, they become quite tough. And I really love how the ever variegated ground beneath my feet feels- it is like a blind person who “sees” by touching things- a very important part of experiencing nature is by ‘feeling’ with our hands, and especially our feet!

The more we use our feet thusly, the more strong and able they become, helping us in our overall health. I liken it to going outside into nature itself: if we lock ourselves indoors, confined to easy chairs, television sets and computers, and artificial light- why, soon we are like slugs, soft and white, unable to do much more than peer about myopically with withered useless limbs and body. Really- most suburban and city dwellers are really in a predicament much like this.

So get outside! Walk (and run) on your land, or in a park or other grassy setting. Barefoot is best, but there are also ‘barefoot shoes’, meaning shoes without support, and thin soles without raised heels. I wear moccasins when the weather cools, and when the terrain is too rocky or tough for barefoot, I wear my Xero shoes- they are shoes with minimal covering, say a thin slab of rubber, with only thin straps to hold it onto your foot. Or, in more inclement conditions still, the same thing with minimal covering on the outside

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