We take our joints for granted until they're injured. None more so than our feet. 

Our feet have 26 bones (25 percent of all bones in the human body are in the feet), 33 joints, and more than 80 tendons and ligaments. There are also 20 main muscles, each with different actions and jobs that help us walk, run, jump and stand.

These muscles can become weakened, tightened and inflamed just from our everyday activities. There is a lot that can go wrong - a lot of attached parts that can transmit stress through the entire foot and into our leg, hips and lower back.
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That's why keeping our feet flexible and strong is worth a little extra effort. This effort not only helps reduce foot and ankle pain but also strengthen the tendons and improves our mobility and gait.

We take our feet for granted until they're injured. I persisted in running too many extra kilometres in my favourite running shoes until my feet told me to grade-up to new shoes. 

As well as bringing out my new shoes, I decided to walk barefooted every day as a way of reconditioning my feet. That turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as I have now found out. You might like to give it a try.

When I decided to walk barefooted, I had no specific theory in mind. I just figured that having the bones, tendons and muscles of my feet moving across a natural surface - road, trail, and the beach in my case - would activate neuromuscular pathways that shoes don't.

We rarely hear of the need to keep our tendons healthy. But we know that our balance gets worse as we age. The things we need to do to keep our tendons healthy also help us better sense the position and movement of our joints.

As we age, our ability to sense the position and movement of our joints degrades, even in very active older people. This loss is more severe in inactive people and leads to a less stable gait and more falls.

This is why it helps to think of regular daily exercise as a means of living longer better by avoiding falls - and also looking better longer with an upright posture. Your aim is not to build muscles and exhaust yourself; it is to improve your balance. In doing that, you'll need to build more muscle, but that outcome is a side-effect.
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The best program to combat loss of balance is a combination of aerobic, balance and strength exercises. This combination keeps our tendons healthy, as well as our ligaments and muscles.

I have zero brand allegiance. I buy when a quality item is on special, including running shoes, irrespective of brand. But from the moment that I stood up in my Saucony Freedom ISO shoes (Black 8.0D) I knew that I could be a fanboy.

Just two years before, almost to the day, I hated running. You know, when you do a "power hour" and the instructor lines you up at the finish for the fireman's shuttle run. Hated it. Even just lining up for sprints across the room - not happy.

I could do it well. It was rare if I was not in a leading group. But I just wanted it to finish.
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The gym went on a summer roster over Xmas (down under in Australia). Although classes were peripheral to how I trained at the gym, I liked to do one class each week for variety. I tried boxing classes and found them a waste of time. As there was nothing in the Xmas program that interested me, I decided to run, twice a week.

​The benefits of omega-3 fats from fatty fish and likely from plant sources like flaxseeds and walnuts are well known. After all, the media frequently talk about the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil, and sales of fish oil supplements are more than $1 billion per year in the United States.

Omega-3 is a polyunsaturated fatty acid, and our only source is from food. Omega-6 is omega-3's cousin, also derived from the food we eat. 

The only difference between omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids is in the structure of their molecules. Both are essential. Our body cannot produce them, so we need to obtain them from our diet.​

It is not a matter of one of them being "better" than the other. We need both, and generally, we all need to eat more of them, as long as we don't get the ratio out of balance.

An imbalance in our omega-3 to omega-6 ratio is associated with adverse health outcomes, potentially negating the overall benefits. For example, a high dietary intake of omega-6 induces a proinflammatory response (raising the level of chronic inflammation) whereas omega-3 has anti-inflammatory properties.

There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that dietary nitrate may have a protective role in health, in particular vascular health, and in particular by lowering blood pressure. 

Coronary heart disease (CHD), stroke, and heart failure are three of the leading causes of death globally. Cardiovascular Diseases (CVDs) are responsible for a significant (typically about 25%) of premature deaths, and the risk substantially increases with age.

​For such a major public health problem, it is perhaps surprising that by simply improved our diet quality - by eating more vegetables - we can substantially reduce the risk of dying early.