Foot Anatomy Made Simple

In order to truly understand your feet, it’s important to be familiar with the basic aspects of the foot’s anatomy. This includes the bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and other physical aspects. The movements of the foot are also important to be familiar with. A general understanding of what and how things can go wrong in the foot and how to evaluate this leads to a more successful outcome. Pain and pain patterns in feet are important as well.

There’s really nothing simple about the human foot. It’s one of the most incredible and complex bioengineered parts of our anatomy. It combines power and speed with delicate movement and balance, solid stability with acute sensitivity, and the foot has sufficient endurance to take us almost anywhere we want to go for as long as we live.

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The growth of the human foot comes in spurts. During the first ten years of a child’s life, foot growth averages about one half-inch a year. Between the ages of ten and twenty, the yearly growth rate slows down considerably, with maturity of growth arriving around age twenty. However, the foot still gets larger with age. This is not true growth but a spreading of the foot due to physical and metabolic changes in the body during one’s lifetime. For example, body weight, pregnancy, training, lifestyle, and shoe wear all could influence the foot to naturally expand or not. A foot that naturally expands results in the need for larger shoes through your lifetime; if you don’t keep up with foot changes, your shoes may become too tight, contributing to or causing problems. Throughout an adult athlete’s life, it’s not unusual for the foot to increase two or more sizes during the course of normal activity.

At any stage of development, incorrect posture, poor walking, running and other training habits, and improper footwear can also significantly disturb foot muscle function, joint alignment, and the structure of the bones themselves.

The basic anatomy of the foot, like the rest of the body, often has variations in its structures—we’re not all exact replicas. But these variations are well adapted for by the muscles. The same is true between the left and right foot. Variations are common, including foot length, which can differ by a whole shoe size or more.