The health of your feet is of major importance to your ability to be an active, well functioning human.

Each human foot consists of:

• 26 bones

• 30 joints

• Over 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments in each foot.

With so many moving parts, it’s important that they remain well moving parts so you can remain a well moving person. Read on for tips on how to choose functional shoes for functional feet, assessing for toe weakness and exercises for happy feet!

So what the “foot” are we talking about here? 

Are your feet sad? They probably are. And they are probably weak too. You might ask why or how? Well it is because of the shoes we wear on a daily basis.

Even if your shoe style is great, you probably have shoes that are not good for your feet. Most shoes are not in the category of what is considered the most functional for your feet. 

If your shoe has a pointed toe, then it is not good for your foot. Have you ever seen a baby’s foot? They are spread out and they don’t come to a point like most of our shoes. Over time when we spend a lot of time in these pointed toe shoes, we start to have conditions like bunions. 

Over time, the fifth toe can even start to curl under our fourth toe. This often creates a big mobility issue within our feet and can interfere with how well our feet can function. With so many moving parts in the foot, it is important that they can move and adapt to the ground beneath us.

Most modern shoes provide too much support for our feet. This can lead to weakness of the muscles in our arches and toes where we should possess adequate strength to support the arch naturally. 

In the rest of this blog we are going to break down everything foot health and what we can do to improve the strength and mobility of our feet. 

The Best Shoe for Foot Mechanics

If you take a Cole Haan shoe, for example, the toes of the shoe are pointed. When you look at a Vivo Barefoot shoe you will see that the toe does not come to a point but rather stays rounded and looks more like a natural foot shape. 

I think the cookie monster was on to something because “One of these things is not like the other.” When we look at shoes not all of them are made equal and when it comes to foot mechanics, the shoes most people wear daily are not ideal to support our natural foot mechanics. 

Most of the time people are not choosing shoes that are functional for their feet but rather fashionable. At the end of the day, the better option will be a more functional shoe that looks like a natural foot to allow the muscles in your feet to do the job they are made to do. 

Toe Weakness: Assessment and Treatment 

Why does it matter if your toes are weak? Well, if your toes are weak then you are more likely to suffer from injuries such as plantar fasciitis, stress fractures, bunions, Achilles tendonitis, and many more. If you have strong toes, not only will you be less at risk for future injuries but you will also be able to run faster and have better balance.

When someone comes into the clinic that needs their toe strength assessed we use our scale and card attachment device. We start by having the patient sit on a chair and put the card under their big toe and simply try to pull it away while they resist it. This will provide an accurate measurement of exactly how strong the toes are in pounds. We first measure the big toe by itself and do the same thing with the other four toes.

This gives us a good quantitative number to determine if we need to strengthen our toes and also to track improvements over time. We want the big toe to be able to generate about 10% of our body weight and the lesser 4 toes able to have about 7% of our body weight. 

Foot Exercises for Happy Feet! 

Let's talk about some ways that we are going to mobilize the feet and the toes. If you have a foot that has been trapped in a shoe its whole life then your foot starts to take on the form of the shoe it has been trapped inside. Your toes become squished together and your foot takes on a more narrow shape.

A healthy and happy foot should be free and mobile but if not, we have ways to mobilize the feet. We have a simple method we use where you simply just weave your fingers between your toes and just move your foot and toes around. You can even move around in a figure 8 pattern. This helps loosen our feet up and create tons of mobility throughout the joints. 

Of course we have many more tips and tricks for mobilizing your feet and toes so check out our latest video to see all the fun exercises we do to make happy feet.