Try this: stand up on solid ground, not the carpet or a rug (or sand or gravel…).
Feel the firm ground beneath your feet. What areas of your foot come into contact with the ground?
Do you have more weight on one foot than the other?
Is there more weight through your heels?
Do your big toes touch the ground at all?
What about your little toes?
Are you thinking, yeah so what?
Oh, I’ll tell you so WHAT! Your foot should have 3 points of contact which create our foot’s tripod, and this then creates the 3 arches of the foot. If your foot doesn’t have the 3 main points then this probably means those arches aren’t able to hold you up properly.
The three points of contact are: first the big toe–some argue the big toe itself, others say the head of the 1st metatarsal. For the sake of avoiding argument, I would take either of those. The second point is the base of the fifth toe, and third is the heel.
Now stand up again and notice if you have contact with the ground at those 3 points? Or do you have greater contact elsewhere? Like maybe the metatarsal heads of 2-4? That can tell you that your metatarsals are angling downward and essentially slamming into the ground instead of laying straight and flat. In this case, yeah you're gonna wanna work on that. Check out this video to correct your alignment:
Back to that big toe, I know I said for the sake of argument I would take either. Well, I would if I had to… but if you're grounding through the metatarsal head because you can't get your big toe the ground, then that’s a problem. Let’s work on that.
Now back to the purpose of this tripod
If you have lost control of pronation, meaning your medial longitudinal arch collapses in and when you walk it does not engage, then you probably have increased contact with the ground medially–inside of the foot. The inside of the foot should really be off the ground.
If you have a very rigid foot, then you may naturally stand on the outside of your feet and have poor grounding directly at the heel and around the big toe.
Our tripod is basically the arches: you could draw a line from your heel to your big toe. This would be the medial longitudinal arch, then from the big toe (and above this through the midfoot but these are the basics) to the little toe. This creates the transverse arch. Then from the little toe to the heel. This would be your lateral longitudinal arch.
FUN! Draw that picture in your mind, stand up again and find contact with your tripod.
And then report back!