Working Pain Free Standing on Concrete Floor

Working on your feet all day while on concrete can be hard on your joints…especially your feet, ankles, and knees according to my memory of when I used to have trouble with it. 

By total accident I discovered how to deal with it and rarely have had trouble since. I would work 8 or 9 hours per day wearing steel toed work boots on a concrete floor and it felt like 20 because my joints would ache so bad. Often, the floor would be slippery making the pain even worse. 

One morning I was feeling pumped up about working out and decided to get on the elliptical machine that had been nothing more than a coat or school bag hanger for years and noticed that standing on the concrete floor didn’t seem to bother me most if not all of the day. This totally surprised me because I thought that I would be using up the comfortable usefulness of my joints by working out on the elliptical machine. I later learned that this phenomena may have been from muscles being “engaged” during the workout as well as getting the blood flowing.

I learned from a family member who was going through several knee surgeries that he had terrible pain in his legs because the “valves” in his veins were not functioning properly resulting in blood building up pressure in his feet and ankles. I believe that something similar may have been happening to me on some level during the workday and that this was relieved by using the elliptical machine and getting blood flowing and “valves” opening and closing.

I’m sure there are forms of exercise other than the elliptical machine that would offer similar results but this is what I found to be quite remarkable.

Years later, I traded my steel toed leather boots for some Sketcher Memory Foam composite toe shoes that offered relief when I was slacking on using the elliptical. When using the elliptical and wearing these shoes I never even think about my feet, ankles, or legs bothering me.