There is no such thing as over-pronation. Myths, shoes, facts and the important bits runners need to know.

To your seasoned runner, the word pronation comes with all the connotations of a 4-eyed young overpaid Englishman, waving a crooked wand around and casting the spell of running doom on you, as you are destined to years of running injuries and poor technique.

Unless, of course, you fork out a few hard earned dollars for the latest and greatest shoes, designed to rid you of your over-pronation curse....

Let me kick off with something that might get your shoelaces in a knot.

There is no such thing as over pronation.

In fact, I don’t even like to use the term pronation at all, when describing a foot.

Because pronation is an ACTION.

It is the beautiful cosmic synchronicity of 33 joints and 28ish bones opening and closing, as muscles load and preload, to frame the amazing sequence of events that we call walking, or in this case, running. But as should rightfully crawl before you run, in this case we might look at how you walk before you run.

What is pronation?

If we can put it very simply, pronation is the action of the joints on the inside of the foot opening, and the outside closing, thus pulling the muscles that attach to the bones and joints on stretch, causing them to react, and pull the bones and joints back to neutral and beyond, as the foot moves in to the opposing action of supination.

Now that’s a long sentence, and it glosses over a gabillion intricate details, but the defining feature we need to be aware of for the sake of this article, is that pronation is movement of the bones.

Why do we need to pronate?

Good question...

Pronation sets up the scenario for the body to experience many different movements. Firstly, the moving into pronation sets up the potential for supination.

Without pronation we can’t supinate.

We can’t have sunset without sunrise, otherwise we either just have the sun or we don’t (there is probably some flat earth conspiracy around that though). We can’t have pronation OR supination, because they are actions that occur as a result of the other.

So my podiatrist, orthopod, physio and everyone else has said my foot is pronated? What gives??

If we think of pronation as an ACTION, then we can only have a pronated foot transiently.

However, we can have an everted foot.

An everted foot looks like a foot that is pronating, but without the juicy good stuff that pronation sets up. As a result of being in a pronated position, it can’t actually pronate. It has not setup a potential load on the muscle to pull it back, or do anything really, as a result of just being stuck there.

Glute issues..?

At least one runner a day comes into my clinic to tell me how they have been told their glutes don't fire (a terminology I don't agree with but more on that later).

If we consider that each joint, from the foot up, is influenced by the one below it, a lack of movement at one joint will surely be compensated somewhere else. Potentially at the knee or hip for starters.

If we then consider that the action of pronation involves the tibia internally rotating (stay with me on this one), this means, most likely, an internal rotation force on the upper leg. With this in mind, not giving the external rotators at the hip (glutes) a job to do, ie., externally rotating the femur, means all the glute bridges and band walks in the world won’t actually get your glutes to do their thing when you walk or run (in the transverse plane anyway).

So why not just buy decent shoes/orthotics?

Hopefully here we come full circle and get to the why of over-pronation. What a great marketing term to have you buy a pair of shoes that stop over pronation. If we imagine such a thing as over-pronation, and we go ahead and block the arch of the foot in order to stop this happening, what do we do to the action of pronation?

We stop it all together.

So if right now, you are throwing your gels and caffeine pills at the computer shouting that you cannot run without your stability shoe/orthotic, I’m not disagreeing with you.

In fact, a number of you may have a very valid reason for them outside of the topics in this discussion. But I can guarantee, it is nowhere near all of you, and if you spent some time actually sorting your shit out, instead of dumping a permanent cast on your foot, I’m sure you would enjoy the experience of not having to rely on your expensive orthotics and stability shoes to run in.

But that certainly doesn’t sell shoes right?....

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