Happy 4th from Two Rivers Treads! Check out this important info on strengthening your big toes.

[Barefoot TJ]

Dr. Mark sent this to me to share with you all. The below pictures show Local Artist and Two Rivers Treads employee Colleen Tracy demonstrating exercises for your toes, mainly your load-bearing big toe, to help you strengthen the toe-off point of the gait cycle:

This photo shows how there should be space between the big toe and the second toe. This is normal and how babies (we) were born. There is a natural fanning/spreading the metatarsals and toes should have. See the notes and pictures on Dr. Marks' Kids Page on his site at http://trtreads.org/Kids_Page.html . Good stuff there!

Here, she demonstrates bearing weight over the big toe to strengthen it. (It's difficult to see here.) He recommends doing this exercise (and testing to see how well you do it the first time) by standing on one foot and balancing for 30 seconds. Notice where you tend to naturally shift/press your weight. You should have more weight over the big toe than the others, so if you're not try to do so when you do the exercise. Also, as part of a good exercise routine , try to lift all of your toes, except your big toe, off the ground (not pictured).

Here she shows another exercise where you practice light landing, foot stability, and elastic recoil through the jump rope motion.

 

[Nyah]

A problem I have with all of

A problem I have with all of the minimalist shoes is that they don't allow the big toe to be as straight as what we see in these photos. The only one that allows it is the VFF, however, physically isolating the toes defeats the purpose of wearing a shoe in the first place, since you can't wear a wool sock with it.

 

[Barefoot TJ]

Dr. Ray McClanahan has some

Dr. Ray McClanahan has some toe spacers that may help with that problem, Nyah. They're called Correct Toes, and you can get them here: http://nwfootankle.com/home/toes You can wear them in your shoes or even run barefoot in them, as Dr. Mark does. You have to start with just a few minutes each day until you can wear them all day. I'm getting a pair, and I am excited, as you all know my toes are very misaligned from when I used to wear shoes.

 

[Nyah]

By the way, where did you

By the way, where did you move this thread to? When I posted my first reply, this thread was titled "Show us your July 4th colors" and it was in the Barefoot Running forum. Now you have some other thread there with that name and this one is nowhere to be found.

 

[Nyah]

Toe-spreaders don't solve the

Toe-spreaders don't solve the problem. As I said, the problem is that even minimalist shoes (VFFs aside) seem to be designed with ignorance, towards the fact that the foot's big toe should be allowed to fan out. You should be able to hold a ruler up to the side of the heel, the side of the ball-of-foot, and the side of the big toe (all 3 points should line up). I've yet to see a shoe which offered this amount of toe-splay.

What I'd like to see are minimalist shoes with properly-oblique toeboxes. It would be great if someone like Dr.Cucuzzella decided to branch out, by offering us such a shoe. If I had the ability to make my own minimalist shoe, I'd start off with the VFF Sprint and then do away with the toe-isolators, giving it a toebox that accommodates wool socks without hindering the spread of the toes. Or give the Terra Plana Alexander sandal a fully oblique toebox (the women's version of it is almost that way now, but still not quite enough and the men's version is far from it).

By the way, I think toe-spreaders are unnecessary for straightening these toes. During my 5 years of wearing open-toed sandals exclusively, my big toes seemed to have straightened out on their own.

 

[Barefoot TJ]

Yes, sorry about moving and

Yes, sorry about moving and renaming the thread. I was multi-tasking and doing too much on the site at the same time (TMOS). Ha!

Anyway, I have been living the barefoot life-style for most of three years now (and barefoot every other time when society allowed). When I have to wear something, it's my homemade huaraches now. My toes are so misaligned that these toe aligners are going to help me realign my toes the way they should be. I have no space between my big toe and my second toe, and as you probably know, I have developed Morton's Neuroma from the years I did run in the wrong kinds of shoes, so my metatarsals are always pinching my nerves, even while I am completely barefoot.

Yes, it would be nice to not have to get to this point and have had the right kind of footwear all along, and it would have been great if my toes would have worked their ways back to where they should have been all along, but that didn't happen to me. I am hoping that after some months of wearing the Correct Toes, my pain will, at least, lessen and my metatarsal fan the way they should be.