Learning to dome the foot (short foot exercise)

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In a nut shell this ; how do you teach/perform foot doming for intrinsic foot muscle strengthening?

IMO, sit on a chair with one leg extended out in front of you, foot plantarflexed at the ankle joint , the heel of the subject foot on the ground . Now flex your toes from plantar flexed to dorsiflexed ,back and forth .

Keep moving the toes as you draw your foot back towards you and the whole of the subject foot comes into contact with the ground . As the toes plantarflex they will now push the ball of the foot up from the ground .

Congratulations ,you are doming .

Under supervision from a qualified person ,sitting on a chair can be progressed to standing to add resistance .

You should experiment with this simple cue before teaching your pts but I have found it to be 100% effective with my pals work colleagues etc .

Also note that I am not a physio or podiatrist and so far nobody else seems to be using this cue . Use it at your own risk but it all seems pretty obvious to me .

How physios from the world of ballet didn't figure this out before is a bit of a mystery since they dome their free feet habitually.

 

One thing I would say is that jumping up and down on one leg with the foot in a domed position seems like a bad idea to me.

 

The first 13 secs of the video gives the general idea .

 

One thing about doming the foot that may not be immediately obvious is that it works many of the muscles of the foot and not just those that support the longitudinal arch.

If the doming exercise is executed whilst seated it can be seen that this causes the foot to narrow across the met heads . This is likely the action of the heads of the adductor hallucis muscle which both adducts and flexes the hallux .

So the doming exercise would appear to have addition benefits when compared to toe gripping exercises .

 

A simple 8 sec video illustration toe adduction during the doming exercise .

 

During weight acceptance in gait the foot is deformable and surface compliant . As the foot progresses through heel off the intrinsic muscle become active contributing to a stiffening of the longitudinally and transversely . The adductor muscle act to both generate a plantarflexing moment at the MTPJs and also to adduct the toes giving a narrowing of the forefoot .

The adductors are aided in this narrowing action by the geometry of the forefoot with the metatarsal parabola seeing the adjacent met heads move closer together mediolaterally and apart anteroposteriorly.

So the foot dome is reduced during weight acceptance and reestablished at heel off.

Videos of met head geometry at heel off ;