The foot is a measurement of length. The man is two feet tall
James Perich
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–In general, we all have defects in our stride –Alejandro Bayo (48) tells me.
No one like him to treat these foot issues.
Alejandro Bayo has been involved in this world for 25 years. He has studied it in depth, he has analyzed the footprint of hundreds of elite athletes, he works with footballers, basketball players, athletes, triathletes… He has set up his podiatric clinic, the Foot Study Center, in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, he has installed next to the office of the great Martín Rueda.
(Martín Rueda and Eduard Sánchez-Osorio are the fathers of sports podiatry in Catalonia; every elite athlete worth their salt has walked before their eyes and passed through their hands, sooner or later).
–Having a neighbor as powerful as Martín Rueda forces me to improve. This is the birthplace of podiatry. He and Sánchez-Osorio innovated a lot. They brought things from the United States. They brought technology. Before them, thirty years ago, we looked at the soles of our feet in glass. Now that’s weird. Today we work with 3D cameras (I counted up to ten in Bayo’s room, distributed in different corners). For the soccer player, I make him practice specific movements. I need to see what pressure he uses in each gesture: we place insoles with sensors under his big toe and analyze him on the soccer field. Checking him when he is barefoot is of no use to us. We have to watch him with his training shoes.
–Do we all walk wrong?
–We have moved from the rural environment, which is irregular, to the urban environment, much more uniform thanks to the asphalt. The foot has small bones that adapt to changes. If we repeat a movement, eventually the mechanism will fail. Therefore, stepping is cyclically incorrect. What I want to tell you is that, before, irregularities protected us.
–¿…?
–We are well made, but poorly finished. And our habits harm us, such as the loss of muscle. We are sitting or on the assembly line, and we repeat the movements. And the runner or the soccer player gets injured through repetition.
–Do we injure ourselves more because comfort weakens us, then?
–By 2035, the use of templates will have grown much more. The population ages and we do more sports. Sport is good, but under certain guidelines.
–Isn’t it always good?
–If you subject yourself to extra stress, you degrade faster.
–Is elite sport bad?
–It depends on the discipline and the impact. The cyclist, for example, has little impact. If he is properly positioned on the bike, everything will be fine. In tennis there is no impact, but there is wear and tear on the elbow and shoulder. Everything is relative.
–Is the podiatrist paid little attention?
–I see kids of fifteen or 16 years old who play on powerful teams and the caregivers forget about their feet. And I remember the case of a Nàstic winger whose name I will not give him, aged thirty, who tore his Achilles tendon while doing a chest check. He was a professional soccer player and they had never looked at his foot. He missed his foot and failed everything in a chain. He is already recovered.
–In athletics, we have the magic shoes, the great technological gift…
–They appeared with Kipchoge, do you remember? The industry told us we would run faster and fatigue less. People came out in droves to buy them, but they are not for everyone. If you are slow and heavy and there is instability in the forefoot, you spend too much contact time on the ground and that harms you.
–But you get less tired…
–Running means spending a lot of time in the air and moving forward. If you have stiffness in your leg or weigh a lot, the shoe will harm you and injure you. People come to me who use them. I ask them about their running pace. If they run 10K in 33 minutes, all good. But if they do it in 50 minutes, that’s another thing. We buy things without having a prior study. What value are 300 euro shoes if you have to take them back because they injure you and you spend the money on physiotherapy?
–And do we all need templates?
-Of course not. We can work the muscles of the foot. They are stretches, exercises that strengthen the calves and the Achilles tendon.
(He also performs this muscle training himself: his foot treatment is comprehensive).
