Focus on Your Feet
Have you ever tried to move your toes one at a time?
Activate your feet with toe yoga & ball rolling!
It’s difficult, and yet we use our feet every day!
We walk all day, stand on them for hours and sometimes squish them into high heels for a night out. Our feet take a lot of abuse and do work constantly! Don't you think it's time you gave them a little loving back?
Our feet have both intrinsic and extrinsic muscles that allow to them to carry us all the places we want to go, but like any muscle or joint, if we don't use them they will lose strength and mobility.
Like our fingers, at one time, our toes could move up and down and side to side. Most of us don't think too hard about just how flexible or how much control we have over our big toe compared to the rest of our toes for example. However, our feet and toes need to be worked out just like the rest of our bodies to stay able and strong and avoid dysfunction like plantar fasciitis.
What’s the problem?
Our feet have 3 arches, a transverse arch, as well as lateral and medial longitudinal arches. You may have heard the phrase, "I have a collapsed arch." Which means that person's foot no longer holds the shape and height of that arch, the muscles are weak and deconditioned, and forces from walking, running and standing are not being appropriately cushioned with weight bearing activity. These arches are important in how we walk, they mediate how our foot cushions us every time we take a step and propel us on to the next. Take some time to strengthen your feet and those powerful muscles will help keep you walking pain free!
Work them out
This is what I call Toe Yoga. Start with your foot firmly placed on the floor and emphasize 3 points of contact grounding you, your heel baby toe and the ball of your foot. Now switch your focus to just grounding your big toe into the ground and lift all 4 other toes off from the floor. Keep your heel on the ground as you do this hold. Now return to your starting position, all 3 points of contact on the ground. This time around focus on leaving all 4 toes on the ground and reach for the sky with that big toe.
Attempt to spread each toe apart from its neighbor.
Stretch them out
Stretch those toes. Reach them out and try to separate each individual toe from one another. Hard isn't it? Keep trying, you'll get there eventually. In the meantime feel free to use your fingers to assist with the motion. This will help establish the motor pathway that your brain has long forgotten about. Eventually with enough the practice the strength and motor memory will come!
Use a ball to roll out and massage the arches of your foot.
Roll them out
Use that handy lacrosse ball, a golf ball or anything else you have lying around. Place your ball under your feet and start rolling. Scanning for sore spots under foot and applying some body weight and pressure through down through the ball to release tension trigger points that have built up from all that hard work.