Methods To Keep Your Feet Healthy
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 and restrict your feet from performing naturally. In the long term, they are not functional. You can indicate the functionality of your shoes by looking at the Heel to Toe Offset, it is the amount of drop from your heels to your toes in your show. When the offset is higher, there will be a higher stress placed on your feet and lower legs. It makes us standing and walking naturally and can contribute to serious consequences for your low back health after time.
Even though our feet are small, they can support a large and shifting mass above them. It is amazing that we donât have feet and ankle pain under each moment. Working on balance is important because they reduce the chances injuries like ankle sprain and fractures and improve the efficiency of your body function at the same time. Balance for aging 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.
You can strengthen your foot and lower leg muscles as well as practicing your balance by standing on one leg for 30-60 seconds.
In our life, we spend a large amount of our time walking. Walking is many peopleâs main way to exercise, but most of us have poor flexibility in muscles, tendons, joints in ankle, foot and lower legs. It is because we never stretch them. According to research, many painful conditions that impact foot and ankle are caused by tightness. So we should improve our mobility, help our body to move more efficiently and reducing unusual loading of tissues by stretching every day or several times a week. For example, you can prevent developing painful condition that affect your function for your Achilles tendon.
Next time, remember to stretch your calves and feet when your are stretching other parts of your  body 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 to check the damages of them Always replace your shows on a regular basis just like your changing your tires!
Wear Flats Shoes which Allows your Toes to Move
Most shoes including athletic shoes have over high heels and little room your toes and move and function naturally. Those thick and pointy shoes are not good for your feet health despite they are then standards in the industry.
It is smart to look for shows with little elevation in the hells and provide room for your toes, no matter what shoes you are looking for. Many women have to wear heels for many occasions, it is fine as long as it is for short periods.
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 you calves will be helpful. Here is a video of exercise on your toes and calves.
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.
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 theâ excessive sole, functioning and lack of room for toes from our shoes. Since we canât barefoot outside, we should strengthen our toes by being barefoot at home and doing some toesâ 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: Â raise up all toes, at the same time, Â 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.
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.
Our feet is 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 should also be stretched sometimes so that they can be healthy flexible and soft all the time.
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 lacrosses ball or a rubber ball that is frim 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. Do this with stretches will be better.
Using  a lacrosse ball in the same way to tight and tender spots is a good way too.
When doing the above work on bottom of feet and calf, donât forget to stretch your toes one by one in a full range of motion.
Find a Physical Therapist
Physical therapists are movement experts that have postgraduate degrees and trainings to evaluate posture, gait, movement patterns, joint and soft tissue, strength and balance restrictions and nerve dysfunctions. By evaluating these parts, they will know the cause of your pain or dysfunction. Physical therapists use many manual therapy techniques, exercises and help you to solve your problem for you to return to a condition of pain free, natural function with no pain medication.
Physical therapists know the root of your foot or ankle problem. It is useful because everyone has different combinations of strengths and weaknesses that may transform to injuries.
A physical therapist will create a customized program of strengthening, stretching, movement and modification to treat your pain regardless of your problems are.
You will know when it is okay to get back to workouts and running safely and confidently with no re-injuries.
Keep in mind that when you are sidelined for more than  two weeks, it is essential to get professional help in order to return to your activities and training, and learning to move with no compensations that can result in more problems. When you go to a dentist twice a year for a check up or give maintenance and oil change for your car, you should also do that with your body. A physical therapist will provide yu movement screening and check out musculoskeletal injuries.
