You’ve scoured the Innovations website and gadget shops, trawled a dozen more sites offering “alternative” gifts, spent hours on eBay, and still you haven’t found that perfect something. But there is something worth having that most of us lack, something that could improve the quality of our lives immeasurably: a wobbly walk.
Seriously. The feet of a typical urbanite rarely encounter terrain any more undulating than a crack in the pavement. While that may not seem like a problem, it turns out that this flat-earth business is not doing us any good. By ironing all the bumps out of our urban environment we’ve put ourselves at risk of a surprising number of chronic illnesses and disabilities.
Fortunately, the free market has come to the rescue. You can now buy the solution – in fact, there’s even a choice of products. Indoor types will appreciate the cobblestone walkway, a knobbly textured plastic mat that they can wobble along in the comfort of their own homes. And there are shoes designed to throw you off balance.
The technology may be cutting edge, but its origins are deep and exotic. Research into the idea that flat floors could be detrimental to our health was pioneered back in the late 1960s. While others in Long Beach, Calif., contemplated peace and love, podiatrist Charles Brantingham and physiologist Bruce Beekman were concerned with more pedestrian matters. They reckoned that the growing epidemic of high blood pressure, varicose veins and deep-vein thromboses might be linked to the uniformity of the surfaces that we tend to stand and walk on.
The trouble, as they saw it, was that walking continuously on flat floors, sidewalks and streets concentrates forces on just a few areas of the foot. As a result, these surfaces are likely to be far more conducive to chronic stress syndromes than natural ones, where the foot meets the ground in a wide variety of orientations. The anatomy of the foot parallels that of the human hand, each having 26 bones, 33 joints and more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments. Modern lifestyles waste all this flexibility in your socks.
Brantingham and Beekman became convinced that damage was being done simply by people standing on even surfaces and that this could be rectified by introducing a wobble.
To test their ideas, they got 65 clerks and factory workers to try standing on a variable terrain floor – spongy mats with different amounts of give across the surface. This modest irregularity allowed the soles of the volunteers’ feet to deviate slightly from the horizontal each time they shifted position. As the researchers hoped, this simple intervention turned out to make a huge difference over just a few weeks. Just a slight wobble from the floor activated a host of muscles in people’s legs, which in turn helped pump blood back to their hearts. The muscle action prevented the pooling of blood in their feet and legs, reducing the stress on the entire cardiovascular system. And two- thirds of the volunteers reported feeling much less tired. Yet, decades later, the flooring of the world’s workplaces remains relentlessly smooth.
Earlier this year, however, the idea was given a new lease on life when researchers in Oregon announced findings from a similar experiment with people over 60. John Fisher and colleagues at the Oregon Research Institute in Eugene designed a mat intended to replicate the effect of walking on cobblestones.
In tests funded by the National Institute of Aging, they got some 50 adults to walk on the mats in their stockinged feet for less than an hour three times a week. After 16 weeks, these people showed marked improvements in balance and mobility, and even a significant reduction in blood pressure. People in a control group who walked on ordinary floors also improved but not as dramatically. The mats are now for sale at $35.
“Our first 1,000 cobblestone mats sold in three weeks,” Fisher says. Demand could exceed supply if this foot-stimulating activity really is a useful nonpharmacological approach for preventing or controlling hypertension of older adults, as the researchers believe.
