Foot health: preventing and treating common injuries, enhancing strength and mobility, picking footwear, and more | Courtney Conley, D.C.

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone.
Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, and we've established a great team of analysts to make this happen. It is extremely important to me to provide all of this content without relying on paid ads. To do this, our work is made entirely possible by our members, and in return, we offer exclusive member-only content and benefits above and beyond what is available for free. If you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level, it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription. If you want to learn more about the benefits of our premium membership, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
My guest this week is Courtney Conley. Courtney is an internationally renowned foot and gait specialist who teaches globally on topics related to foot function, gait mechanics, and strategies to combat foot and ankle pain. She is the founder of Gait Happens, a group of clinicians providing high quality, online, cutting edge foot education. She is also the owner and operator of Total Health Solutions Clinic and gym in Golden, Colorado, where she heads patient care with a focus on restoring gait mechanics and helping people resolve their foot problems. She holds a BA in kinesiology and a BA in human biology and a doctorate in chiropractic medicine. In this episode, we speak about all things related to the foot. We talk in great detail about the anatomy and complexity of the foot. And unfortunately, you do need to understand this if you want to understand why things go wrong in the foot, as they so often do. Now, I should mention at this point that I know many of you listen to this podcast in audio only, and that's fine. This, again, might be one of those episodes that is worth watching on video. And the reason for that is that Courtney uses a model of the foot quite a bit when we're talking about anatomy, and even when we come back to some of the pathology of the foot, because it's just easier to actually see, for example, why you end up getting a bunion if you understand the biomechanics and anatomy of the foot. So with that said, we speak about loading, balance, falls, control, range of motion, posture. We talk about the common injuries, again, including what I just mentioned, bunions, tendon issues, toe weakness, Achilles injuries, hammer toes, plantar fasciitis, and much more.
Through this conversation, we do a deep dive into all the various shoes that people should be looking at, not only as adults, but potentially as children.
In addition to this interview that you're about to hear, we also recorded a video in the gym to better explain a number of the concepts that we spoke about. So in this video, we break it down into diagnostic tests that are used to determine mobility, strength, etc. And then we cover the exercises that you should do to improve the outcomes based on the diagnostics. So this interview will be available to everyone. The videos from the gym will only be available to our paid subscribers, and they can be found on the show notes page. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Courtney Conley.
Courtney, awesome to see you. Thank you for making the trip to Austin. It's much better to be doing this in person, I think, than by video, given all the content we're going to cover.

**Courtney Conley** (3:48)
Thank you so much. I'm very excited.

**Peter Attia** (3:50)
So before we kind of get into the foot, help me understand your personal obsession with this part of the body. Where did that begin?

**Courtney Conley** (3:58)
I grew up as a ballet dancer, and pretty much all through grade school and high school, I spent a lot of time on my feet, a lot of time in ballet pointe shoes, which, as you know, are very rigid, stiff. You're up on your toes. And I kind of always battled foot pain.
And then when I decided to choose this as a career, I was my self-exploration. I thought I was going to learn all of this stuff about the foot, and that just didn't happen. I really didn't get a lot of education in regards to how the foot actually functions.

**Peter Attia** (4:29)
Because you're a chiropractor by training. Why did you choose that over, say, podiatry or something that was purely focused on the foot?