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The story of intrinsic foot muscle strengthening and how it was solved

Discussion in 'Biomechanics, Sports and Foot orthoses' started by scotfoot, Nov 11, 2023.

  1. scotfoot

    scotfoot Well-Known Member


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    Once upon a time, as running for health reasons became more popular, a group of experts got together and helped design shoes that made running easier. Unfortunately, they did not realise that their designs also made feet a lot weaker and so the foot health of entire nations deteriorated.

    At first the researchers denied any responsibility and claimed that their shoes did not impact the mechanics of the foot at all and that the foot was just as strong as it should be, but gradually other researchers showed this not to be the case and so the hunt was on for a way of putting strength back into people snoozing foot musculature.

    Exercises like toe curls were used but dragging a towel towards you was found to achieve almost nothing . A world renowned fellow called Janda, invented a foot exercise called the "short foot exercise" but remarkably he failed to take into account the fact that toe flexors flex the toes! Other researchers encouraged people to do calf raises on an incline but again this was found to be entirely ineffective when it came to strengthening the intrinsic foot muscles.

    Those who knew how important the foot muscles were to lower limb strength began to despair. They knew that a really effective strengthening exercise might have the ability to reduce falls in the elderly, compress morbidity in people suffering from debilitating foot conditions and even dramatically reduce injuries in recreational runners.


    Eventually, a ground braking piece of research was carried out by Bruening ,Irene Davis et al 2019 and here is the key finding - If you stand favouring one foot and press your toes down you will activate intrinsic foot muscles like the abductor hallucis much more than toe curls will . However, if you place resistance in the form of an inelastic strap across the top of the foot and press the toes down, thereby levering the top of foot up against that inelastic resistance, then the activity in the abductor hallucis will be much greater than simply pressing your toes down. So at this point it was demonstrated that doming against some form of resistance was the way to target the intrinsics. To be continued .......


    Below toe curl vs toe press vs doming Bruening et al

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  2. scotfoot

    scotfoot Well-Known Member

    Anyway despite the best efforts of researchers a reliable way of strengthening the toe flexor muscles, and the intrinsic foot muscles appeared to remain elusive . Indeed, only this year a paper was published by Willemse et al that looked at muscle activation levels with various foot exercise and concluded that perhaps functional exercises might be a better option.

    Here is what the concluded;
    Results: Functional exercises showed larger mean EMG amplitudes than the isolated foot exercises in 25% of the 12 comparisons, while there was no difference in the remaining 75%. Conclusion: Functional exercises provoked comparable or even more activation of the PIFMs than isolated foot exercises. Given that functional exercises are easier to perform, this finding indicates the need to further investigate the effectiveness of functional exercises in physical therapy to improve muscle function and functional task performance in populations that suffer from PIFM weakness or dysfunction.

    So basically the whole story about how to strengthen the intrinsic foot muscles had gone round in a circle. Not so good.

    But the story has a happy ending although the solution may take some time to be universally adopted, possibly many years.

    In 2021 Goldmann et al produced a paper comparing the toe flexor strength of elite female gymnasts who had trained and sprinted barefoot from an early age with the toe flexor strength of young adult male sports students. The toe flexor strength of the gymnasts was 80-90% higher than the male students. However, 7 weeks high load resistance training strengthened the males feet to the same levels as the female gymnasts( see device used below). In other words, toe flexor strength gained from years of barefoot sprinting/jumping can be replicated by just 7 weeks of targeted toe flexor strength exercise.(10 mins 4x a week) As far as I am aware the apparatus used by Goldmann is not commercially available but the Novabow System, which can be used to achieve the same ball park results, is.

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