Have you ever seen gnarly toes dressed in a gorgeous strappy sandal? "Poor thing" we think. Then "Thank God those aren't my feet". On the other hand, and I'm sorry to be blunt, but perhaps you look down at your own feet and see Gnarly Toes.
Here's the good news: you don't necessarily have to have gnarly toes. Ever. And if you do have them now, you don't necessarily have to have them forever. But you do have to do something about it other than hoping or wishing. Are you ready to take it on?
This is the bottom of your foot. As you can see it is made up of many small bones, and each joint has potential for movement.
The bottom of the foot has lots of small muscles to pull on the bones of the foot. Here I've drawn in the line-of-pull of a group that operates on toes 2-5 (the flexor digitorum brevis group). If this group is too tight, it will pull the knuckles of the toes toward the heel, creating Gnarly Toes.
Instead of lying flat like this:
The toes will be pulled into the classical "Gnarly Toe" shape. (You can correct your podiatrist when he calls it a claw toe. Tell him the correct term is "Gnarly".) I illlustrated this shape with just the little toe here, but you can see what I mean, right?
In life it looks like this:
So what to do about this? You need to lessen the tension on that flexor digitorum brevis group so it doesn't drag the tip of the toes down. In other words, you need to stretch out your feet. Generally speaking, muscles that are tight are also weak and unable to generate force dynamically or powerfully. Weak foot muscles make you a slow runner and will lead to calf strain because the calf muscles will try to do the job of the couch potato foot muscles. So there is a two-pronged approach necessary here: stretch and strengthen. Get a tennis ball and a theraband and join me on the video that I will post this afternoon.
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