Improve Your Yoga Practice by Spreading Your Toes

If you aren't a full time yoga teacher, then you probably aren't blissfully able to keep your feet free of those torture devices called shoes, you know the ones that stuff your toes into ridiculously small spaces where they are all jammed together for 8+ hours a day. Shoes tend to not be great for the anatomy of feet or toes unless you're extremely mindful in your footwear choices, but what does this have to do with yoga?

Most days we tend to throw on shoes and not give our feet another thought, but when entering the studio space and practicing in yoga we are asked to remove our shoes and socks. It may be one of the few spaces outside our home where we are confronted with our feet in a way that we normally aren't outside of our homes. Also, so many yoga poses bring our feet close to our face and into our line of sight (i.e. forward folds, leg behind the head, etc) in ways that would never normally happen throughout the day.

Over time shoes have the potential to change your actual foot anatomy (i.e. bunions) in not a good way. Toe flexibility and mobility are so important, in and out of the studio, from taking stairs, walking, running and balancing. They are an important part of the push-off action humans use and if your toes are stiff, the smoothness and efficiency of gait will be affected, and other joints and muscles will have to compensate for the disturbance in the chain of actions(1). If you can no longer spread your toes you may even have a harder time balancing in poses, especially in the one-legged balancing ones. Why? Because when the toes can spread wide, they create a broader foundation for balance poses (1) which can make them more accessible and additionally the toes transmit subtle information about body-weight shifts to the brain, which will use it to correct and fine-tune its balance responses in the pose.(1)

yoga-toes-spread-wide.jpg
foot-with-toes-spread-wide.jpg

Homework: 
Try the awesomeness in this video!

Enhancing practice through education that elevates.

Explore: Wild Thing School of Yoga / Wild Thing Photography / Instagram

Copyright © 2021 Wild Thing Photography and School of Yoga, LLC. All rights reserved.

Arielena Reed