Methods To Keep Your Feet Healthy

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You can live a healthier life and possibly relieve some of your pain from our advice. Here are some tips that can keep your feet healthy:

Avoid Shoes with High-to Toe Offset

We all like pretty shoes, especially high heels. However, these modern and dressy shoes are not functional. They actually restrict your feet from performing naturally. In the long term, they are bad for your feet health. You can determine the functionality of your shoes by looking at the heel-toe drop. It is the height difference between your heels and toes. When the difference is higher, there will be more stress placed on your feet and lower legs. It makes it difficult to stand and walk naturally. As a result, it can contribute to serious consequences for your back after prolonged use.

Work on your Balance

Even though our feet are small, they can support a large and shifting mass above them. It is amazing that we don’t have ankle pain anytime we move. Working on balance is important because they reduce the chances of injuries like sprains or fractures. It also helps improve the efficiency of your body function at the same time. Balance for ageing people will deteriorate and increase the possibility of falling. It is essential to maintain balance, especially for older groups as falling can lead to serious consequences. Taking walks help keep your feet healthy. 
 
You can strengthen your feet as well as practice your balance by standing on one leg for 30-60 seconds.

Stretch

In our life, we spend a large amount of our time walking. Walking is many people’s main way to exercise. But most of us have poor flexibility in our ankle, feet and lower legs. It is because we never stretch them. Tightness causes many painful conditions that impact the feet and ankle according to research. So we should improve our mobility to help our body and keep our feet healthy. We can do that by stretching several times a week. For example, stretching can prevent harming your Achilles tendon.
 
Next time, remember it is healthy to stretch your calves and feet when you are stretching in the morning.

Change Your Shoes Regularly

You should change your running shoes if it is worn for more than four months. Check the bottom of shoes for damages of the soles. Always replace your shoes on a regular basis just like the frequency of changing your tires!

Wear Flats Shoes which Allows your Toes to Move

Most shoes including athletic wear have heels and little room for your toes. Those thick and pointy shoes are not good for your feet’ health despite how standard they are in the industry.
 
It is smart to look for shoes with little height and which can provide room for your toes, no matter the type of shoes you are looking for. Women usually have to wear heels for many occasions. This is fine as long as it is for short periods of time.
 

Strengthen your Toes and Calves

You will reduce the chances to develop injuries including ankle spaces and the ones that caused by overuse syndrome by strengthening your toes and calves. Paying attention most to your calves will help keep your feet healthy. 

Strengthen your Toes and Ankles

By strengthening your toes and ankles, you  will keep a normal gait pattern, prevent repetitive stress and weight on  joints, maintain a normal arch, so that your strong foot helps your knee and hip to move and perform much better.

Here is a practice that helps you to strengthen your calves, toes extensor and improve the movements for your toes, which you need for normal walking.

Strengthen Your Toes and Arch

The muscles and tendons you use to curl your toes help to keep the normal arch of your feet.  It is important to keep you flexors hallucinate braves and longus, flexor digitorum longus and your lumbricals strong to keep your feet healthy and mobility free. Your feet  hold and support the weight from your body so it is vital to make sure the arch functions normally. This is a daily exercise for you.

Strengthen Your Toes

Your feet are the base of your body, therefore it has to be supportive. Our feet and lower leg muscles can stop functioning naturally because of the’ excessive sole, functioning and lack of room for toes from our shoes. Since we can’t barefoot outside, we should strengthen our toes by being barefoot at home and doing some toes’ strengthening.

Besides are some exercises that help you to strengthen your toes. They seems easy but actually not, and you probably need you hands to help you at the beginning. It is normal for you to feel minimal motion and control, you will improve once you practice many times.

Big Toe Flexion:  raise up all toes, at the same time,  keep your heel and ball of the foot on the floor. Then slowly lower the big toe to the floor, keep other toes up.

Arch up: Keep foot flat on the floor, and now elevate your arch higher. Try not scrunching your toes or turning your knees out.

Big Toe Extension: Place your foot flat on the floor, raise your big toe and keep other  toes and heel on the floor.

Big Toe and Little Toe Flexion: Keep the ball of foot and heel down, raise up the toes. You then lower your little toe to the floor and keep the other toes up. Put the little toe is down and lower the big toe to the floor. Your foot is supposed to be on the floor with big and little toes down and the other three up. This is a challenging exercise and you may need to practice many times.

Allow Your Toes to Splay

In a long time of the day, we cram our feet in shoes and squeeze our toes together very tight, which stops them from moving, splaying and functioning normally to support our body when we are walking and weight bearing. It can result in lower extremity dysfunctions, such as bunions.

We should remove our shoes and barefoot at the end of the day in order to pamper our feet and allow them to function healthily. If you feel the exercises above are too hard for your toes as they have poor dexterity, wear toe spreader to improve mobility and motor control. They help your toes and feet muscles to recruit from the position of splaying. You may need a little time to get used to it, and it will regain your mobility and balance greatly after some time. You still need to do the exercises because they are not a substitute for them.

Pamper your Feet

Our feet are made to be robust, carry weight from the body and connect us to the floor. We all stretch our hips, shoulders, back, and neck, but feet health should also be considered. Stretch your feet so that they can be flexible and soft.

You should use a foam roller and lacrosse ball to massage and use the areas that are sore from running, walking and standing.

A helpful exercise would be to roll your foot with a lacrosse ball or a rubber ball that is firm on the bottom sides and top.

For feet that are in pain and sore, freeze a water bottle and roll on it back and forth. After a workout, long uses of your feet or hiking, use a foam roller to maintain the suppleness of the muscles by rolling all ears of your calf. Doing this with stretches will be better.

When doing the above work on bottom of feet and calf, don’t forget to stretch your toes one by one in a full range of motion.

If you’re looking for more feet stretching ideas check here

Find a Physical Therapist

Physical therapists are movement experts that are trained to evaluate posture, gait, movement patterns, joint and soft tissue, strength and balance and nerve dysfunctions. By evaluating these parts, they will know the cause of your pain or dysfunction. Physical therapists use many physical techniques, exercises and other methods. The goal above all is to help you function with no pain medication.

Physical therapists can help find the root of your problem. It is useful because everyone has different strengths and weaknesses with regard to the body. As a result, the injuries might need to be treated in a specific way.

A physical therapist will create a customized program of strengthening, stretching, movement and modification to treat your pain.

Keep in mind that if you are resting for more than two weeks, it is essential to get professional help in order to return to your activities and training. Learning to move by yourself can result in more problems. You visit a professional when you need a teeth check-up or for an oil change for your car so why not do that for your feet health. A physical therapist will provide you with movement screening and check out musculoskeletal injuries.

Contact us if you have any questions.