How many bones are there in our feet?
Our feet work hard day after day and we usually don't give them a second thought until they start complaining. When you enjoy reflexology and foot massage sometimes it starts you thinking about those two things stuck at the bottom of our legs! Often when I'm working with people's feet they ask questions about their bones, nerves and joints.
A human foot & ankle is a strong, mechanical structure that contain 26 bones, 33 joints, more than 100 muscles, tendons & ligaments and a whopping 250,000 sweat glands. Sweat glands in the feet produce approximately half a pint of perspiration daily. A third of all the bones in the body are located in our feet. Its not surprise that they benefit from massage with such complex mechanics in two small packages. During an average day of walking, the total forces on your feet can total hundreds of tons, equivalent to an average of a fully loaded cement truck. No wonder they ache!
Walking is the best exercise for your feet. The average person will walk around 115,000 miles in a life time, that's more than four times around the earth!It contributes to your general health by improving circulation and weight control. Standing in one spot is far more tiring than walking because the demands are being made on the same few muscles for a longer length of time. Foot ailments can become your first sign of more serious medical problems. Your feet mirror your general health, so conditions like arthritis, diabetes, nerve and circulatory disorders can show their initial symptoms in your feet. So if your feet are changing or hurting don't ignore them, they may be trying to tell you something.
Here are a few fun facts about feet:
- During the first year of a child’s life their feet grow rapidly, reaching almost half their adult size.
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Butterflies taste with their feet.
- Gannets incubate eggs under their webbed feet.
- Elephants use their feet to hear, even with those big ears! – they pick up vibrations of the earth through their soles.
- Shoe size in Britain is measured in barley-corns, a unit of measurement that stretches back to Anglo-Saxon times.
- The measuring device in shoe shops is called a Brannock Device, after the inventor who designed it in the Twenties.
- It takes at least five to six months to grow an entirely new toenail.
- By 12, a child’s foot is about 90 per cent of its adult length.
- The current Guinness World Record for number of feet smelled — about 5,600, is held by Madelaine Albrecht.
