How To Fix Your Knee Pain By Strengthening Your Toes

Have you ever thought about your toe strength and how that might be affecting your foot problems, ankle problems, even your knee problems? Well, today’s video I’m going to show you how to test your toe spring. And then how to strengthen your toes if you got weak toes and I’m willing to bet that you probably do have weak toes.

Most people do, I’d say about seven out of 10 people have weakness in their toes, and I’ll show you how to find it. In a few cases, people truly do have enough strength and you don’t even worry about it. You’ll also see if your feet are strong enough, and you don’t need to exercise them.

Real quick. My name is Dr. David Middaugh. I’m a specialist physical therapist, I will pass on manual physical therapy. And this channel is dedicated to helping people stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery, injections and medications. Please subscribe to our channel so you don’t miss any of our helpful videos.

We put out videos every week to help you stay healthy, active and mobile. So let’s get to it. Let’s test your toe strength first. So go ahead just kick out your heel. I’m going to help you out here. Yeah, just like that. Perfect. Now with your toes. You can do this both at the same time or one at a time.

Go ahead and start curling them slowly, slowly, and see how far you can get before you start to cramp. And you want to see if you can get all the knuckles to curl on her toes. These knuckles curl pretty good. Little toke Lisicki can curl just a bit more. And definitely these knuckles aren’t curling enough. So relax. And now you can self test this, I’m going to do it for her, go ahead and put your foot out again, when I curl her toes, you her joints right here kind of want to pop up just a bit. But I’m going to take them to the Emirates here, it’s going to feel like a big stretch.

But now you hold your toes right there, I’m going to let go and watch how the toes kind of pop up just a bit, especially big toe. This one can go down more, that is not strong enough could relax her toes, her muscles and her toes are not strong enough to bring this joint all the way down and it doesn’t want to curl all the way down because there’s some weakness in there. So there’s just a tiny bit of weakness.

Now if you’re at home and you’re curling your toes, and you’re doing this bit where one sticks up like that, or, or a couple don’t want to bend very good, then you definitely have some weakness in those toes. Usually the outer toes are the weaker ones big toe will come down quite a bit. But these will kind of stay up like that.

That’s a sign that the muscles that control those toes are not strong enough. And they’re not giving you the support that you need whenever you go walk or exercise or do do things around the house. So what you’re going to have to do is with your hand, I’ll show you in a second, you’re going to push your toes down with your finger, and then hold it and start to let go. Good hold. And try to keep your toes you’re at the end range.

This little one will go down as much. There you go. Hold it, hold it, hold it, grab, grab, grab, like you’re grabbing my finger down here. And then after 10 seconds, you can like go ahead and relax. And do this 10 times just curl all the way down, hold it right there. Don’t let it go.

I’m giving her an assist. But she’s working her muscles in here are working a little bit of here as well. And this is really important because these muscles, they support the ankle joint they support all the foot bones right here, go and relax. And wait because the foot can move in and outwards right here.

Watch her knee when I told her foot outwards, which is raising the arch for knee goes outwards. And if I drop the foot inwards, dropping the arch, the knee rolls inwards, when the whole leg rolls inwards a bit and that needs holes in it starts to compress the inside of the knee joint especially right here on the inner part. And that can compress the meniscus often.

But if you have good toe strength, which raises the arch right here, it’ll roll the the leg slightly out. And when you’re doing this 1000s of times as you’re walking throughout the day, doing your exercises, it adds up to taking tons of pressure off the knee joint. As well as off the ankle.

It keeps the ankle in good alignment because ankle joints get out of alignment often when the bone will shift too far forward, and it’ll get jammed. And then the foot joints and cells will stay flexible and mobile as they should because you can get arthritis in these joints as well. To go ahead and curl those toes again. I’m just going to show you some variations here.

Once you’ve gotten full strength which can take weeks, sometimes even a couple of months to bend these joints and getting the pop up soon. It seems like they’re already starting to bend better this little toe doesn’t want to go as good. And see the knuckle wanting to pop up right there. Then what we’ll do is give it some resistance go and relax for a second. Let’s catch a breath.

Can whenever you’re ready, go ahead and just pull like that. And it’s work if you do this, find yourself starting to shake just a bit. Then relax. Okay, now I’m going to angle the camera of slightly just so you can see how Emma’s going to do on her own. She had to cross a leg over and grab your toes.

 

So he’s you’re the head here. So yeah, like that. She At home, you’re going to sit like this legs crossed, grab your toes, pull over just a bit and give it give yourself that assistance by pulling your toes down. And then with your own foot muscles grab, and your hands just there to give some extra pressure to get your joints all the way to the end.

If you got a Bunyan issue your toes kind of going crooked at this joint, be very careful if you’ve had a surgery in the past. Also be very careful, do what your body allows you to do without it hurting during or right after the exercise. But you are going to get sore. By the way, if you’ve never worked out your foot muscles, this is going to make you quite sore in your foot, as well as in the cafeteria, right, usually the lower cafeteria.

And you’ll hold this for 10 seconds 10 times at a time I whenever we get patients in here with this specific weakness, I had them doing this hourly throughout the day, sometimes, at least every couple of hours, I’ll tell them kick off your shoes, you can keep your socks on if you want. But shoes Just don’t let your toes crawl the way because of the sole issue. And you would do this on both sides, obviously.

Now once your joints can go through the full range of motion or pretty close to it, then you can do this without using your hands. So go ahead and bring your legs down. Once you’ve gotten full range of motion in your toes, all you got to do is at home or if you’re at work, just kick off your shoes and kick you slide your feet out a bit so your toes have space to curl and then curl them both down and hold it for a solid 10 seconds you’re working on getting all the joints down the full motion that they can go.

And, you know personally, I’ll tell you my story real quick. I’ve had foot issues in the past joints of shift and tendinitis problems in my Achilles tendon. And what I found is a muscle imbalance between all five of these muscles that are in the calf area.

Specifically, for me, I had weak toe flexors, I’ve got longer toes, so it takes more strength from my flexor hallucis longus and flexor digitorum longus to be able to effectively control my toes and support the the needs of the foot here and the ankle joint as well.

So if you’ve got longer toes, especially like if your second toe is longer than your big toe, you probably have longer toes, just the average got that that longer toe, then you’ve probably just got to strengthen those toes a bit more than the person who has more even toe to the bigger toes longer than the rest of the toes.

But watch out for a video here real soon on how to use these muscles functionally during walking and standing activities. But for now, give us a like if you found this exercise helpful if you have weak toes.

Drop us a comment. Let us know if you found out that for the first time and if this exercise is helping you out what’s the how it’s going as well. And don’t forget to subscribe and turn on your notifications so you don’t miss any of the videos we’re going to be putting out to help you stay healthy, active and mobile while avoiding unnecessary surgery injections and medications. Have a wonderful day guys.