11/02/2026
If you're over 55 and want to know how well you're actually aging, your feet are telling you before anything else does.
Here's one I check constantly, on almost every patient who walks in: how far your knee moves forward over your foot without your heel lifting off the ground.
Stand barefoot facing a wall. Heel flat. Drive your knee forward until it touches.
I've had patients tell me their ankles feel fine, they're not worried about it at all. Then I put them against the wall and the heel pops up. Or one side travels way farther than the other, and they had no idea.
That's the part I wish more people understood. You don't feel yourself lose a few degrees of ankle motion a year. What you feel, months later, is that squatting gets harder, your stride gets shorter, stairs take more out of you than they used to.
By the time someone tells me "I just feel older," I can usually already see it at the wall.
Try it right now. If your heel lifts, don't brush it off — bring it up at your next visit.
