Foot pain can be debilitating and persistent, affecting your everyday life in a significant way. Whether you’re suffering from plantar fasciitis, stress fractures, tendonitis, or any other kind of foot or ankle pain, there’s a simple solution that doesn’t require drugs, needles, or surgery: going barefoot.
Understanding the importance of foot muscles
New research from Ithaca College’s School of Health Sciences and Human Performance suggests that barefoot activities could be key to overcoming foot pain. This is because the small, often overlooked muscles in your feet play an essential yet underappreciated role in movement and stability. These foot muscles are similar to the core muscles in the abdomen. The feedback cycle between the larger “extrinsic” muscles of the foot and leg, the smaller “intrinsic” muscles of the foot, and the neural connections that send information from those muscle sets to the brain is crucial for a healthy foot function.
When this feedback loop is disrupted, it can lead to overuse injuries that can cause long-lasting pain. The main culprit for this disruption is shoes. When you wear shoes with thick soles, they create a dampening effect on the feedback between muscles, causing the more massive muscles to over-compensate and over-exert themselves. This over-exertion leads to injuries and leaves you in discomfort.
Strengthening the foot core to decrease pain
To prevent these injuries and alleviate foot pain, it’s essential to strengthen the small muscles in your feet. The best way to do this is by going barefoot as much as possible at home and work. This allows the foot muscles to build up strength naturally. There are also some exercises you can do to improve your foot strength even more:
1. Barefoot exercise – Activities like Pilates, yoga, martial arts, and some types of dance that don’t require shoes are excellent for developing foot core strength. These exercises let your body deal with changing postures and forces that work the small muscles in your feet.
2. Short-foot exercise – To do this exercise, focus on squeezing the ball of your foot back toward your heel, without curling your toes. This subtle motion can be done either seated or standing. To begin, sit in a chair with your bare feet on the floor and engage the muscles in the arches of your feet as you try to slide the big toe of each foot toward the heel. Hold for six seconds and then relax. Do 2 to 3 sets of 8 to 10 repetitions. Once you’re comfortable with this, try the move while standing.
3. Toe swapping – Start with your foot flat on the floor, applying equal pressure to your heel, the base of the big toe, and the base of the little toe. Raise your big toe while keeping the other four toes pressed into the floor. Hold this position for a few seconds and then flatten your big toe and lift up the four smaller toes simultaneously. Make sure your whole leg doesn’t roll back and forth as you alternate between the two positions.
4. Playing the piano – With your foot flat on the floor and equal weight on the inside and outside of the foot, raise your big toe. Keeping the big toe raised, lift the second toe, then the third, fourth, and finally, your little toe, making sure to lift each toe separately. Once all your toes are off the floor, start putting them back down one at a time, beginning with the little toe. Continue rippling them up and down, similar to someone playing scales on a piano.
Don’t let foot pain make your life miserable. Spend more time barefoot and use these exercises to strengthen the core muscles of your feet. You’ll be back on your feet and moving pain-free in no time.
