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Before you start on your foot, massage your calf. Sit with one leg bent at the knee in front of you, resting in such a way that your leg is relaxed. Run your hands alternately up the back of your calf a few times to warm it up. Place your foot across your other knee, resting it just above the ankle. Now run both hands along your foot from the toe towards the heel. One will run up your shin, one will run along the sole of your foot coming off at the heel. Do this stroking action a dozen times or so. Repeat this action between other movements, it flushes the waste products away to be picked up by the lymphatic system and removed from the body. Next, using thumbs or fingers, make small circular movements around the outside of each ankle bone. Work a little more on any area that is sore or feels gritty, the latter is due to scar tissue and benefits from the friction movements to disperse it. Move on to the sole of the foot, making similar circular movements on the heel pad and on the base of each toe (ball of the foot and the smaller toe joints). Then run your clenched knuckles along the sole of the foot, along the arch, from toe to heel. Take hold of each toe and move it around gently in each direction before pulling it slightly. Grasp two neighbouring toe joints with thumb and fingers of both hands and pull them up and down against each other, this is called ‘breaking the kit-kat’, to give you some idea of the motion involved. Do this for each pair of joints. Then clasp all of your fingers together over all the toes and rub those toe joints between the heels of your hands. Keep hold and twist the end of your foot to one side and then the other in a stretch. Hold your foot around the centre with one hand and the toe joints in the other and make opposing circular movements to loosen the area. Hold your leg above the ankle and push your whole foot first one way and then the other, and then forward and back. Make the stretch quite firm in each direction. Grasp your heel bone in one hand and your ankle in the other and push quite firmly from side to side, then grasp the foot and move it up towards the body and back, still holding your leg above the ankle. | ||
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CATHERINE HOLLAND Tel: 0701 7415310 Email: catherine@catherineholland.co.uk | |
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