We receive a lot of requests for foot exercises during our group classes so we thought we'd make a post to share a) three simple foot exercises you can do at home and b) a few of our favorite products that help keep our feet strong and healthy!
Check out the video below to follow along with Destinie as she teaches:
1) Short Foot: This exercise helps strengthen the medial arch of the foot. The medial arch is what puts a "spring" into each step; it is your shock absorption arch! If you consider yourself someone with "flat feet," this exercise is for you.
2) Toe Extension: Our poor toes! They get crammed into small socks and shoe-shaped, not foot-shaped shoes, thereby making them permanently squeezed together and inflexible. This only gets worse with age if we don't have an active foot-strengthening routine. Ever notice that older folks have a harder time walking and balancing? The deterioration of the toes is a factor. By practicing toe extension with abduction (aka, spreading the toes apart), we can take the shoe out of the foot and toes to reestablish stability and mobility. We need our toes to extend every time we take a step!
3) Calve Raises: Your hands and feet contain half the bones in your body. Pretty crazy, huh! With 26 bones in each foot, there's not a lot of room for all of the muscles and tendons to fit. This means that the foot has extrinsic muscles–muscles that move the foot that live outside of the foot itself. Your calves are just one example of an extrinsic foot muscle.
What's in between the feet and the calves? The ankles! Thus, keeping your medial arch, toes, and calves strong and mobile supports ankle health.
On to some of our favorite keep-your-feet-healthy products! We are not affiliated with any of these items; we just love them.
1) Correct Toes: if you look down at your feet and see that all of your toes are squished together, you may want to consider grabbing a pair of these toe spacers. Here's the deal: most shoes are shoe-shaped and do not actually conform to the natural shape of your foot. Narrow, triangular toe boxes squish our toes together, making our toe adductors (specific muscles to squeeze the toes together) tight and our toe abductors (specific muscles to spread the toes apart) loose. Tight and loose result in weak. Correct Toes are awesome because they gently and passively start to loosen up the toe adductors, which thereby helps our toe abductors function better. Why are spread apart toes ideal? It has to do with the biomechanics of transferring force from your toes into the foot and up the chain. 
(Correct Toes on feet!)
2) Shoes matter:
Here are three of our favorite footwear companies. All three companies have a few features in common.
a) Wide Toe Box: Destinie wears her Correct Toes in her Vivo Barefoot shoes! Pick a shoe that honors the shape of your foot. Your toes expand wider than your heel; the toe box of your shoe should as well.
b) Flexible Sole: Marketers have sold the idea that foot and ankle stability come from stiff, thick, inflexible shoe soles. But let us remind you that our ancestors didn't even wear shoes, so, there's no way that's true. A flexible sole allows for the three arches in your feet to contract and stretch and bend and move in all of the ways nature designed them to do so. Letting your feet do what they do best – that's how you find foot and ankle stability. A flexible sole is also generally less thick. This is great for developing proprioception in your feet (aka, being able to feel your foot in space). Better proprioception in your feet means better connection to the earth and therefore a better relationship with ground reactions forces.
c) Minimal to light Cushioning: As mentioned above, a flexible, on-the-thin-side sole helps us to actually feel our feet in space. It's important to notice how your toes, balls of the feet, and heel contact the ground when you move. Remember: your feet don't just impact the feet; your feet are just the beginning of the kinetic chain! Now, we'll note here that minimal to light cushioning is definitely not for everyone. You have to already have a bit of natural cushion in your foot. If you've been told that the fat pad on the sole of your foot has diminished, you may need a bit more cushion from your shoe. Altra offers an array of sole types.
(From right to left: Vivo Barefoot, Altra, Lems)
When you get a pedicure do you ever pay the extra $15 for a ten-minute foot massage? Take that money and put it towards a MELT Hand and Foot Kit and never pay for a foot massage again. As we mentioned earlier, the hands and feet contain over half of the bones in the body. What's between bones? Joints. We do so much with our hands and feet, most of it unconsciously. It is important to perform some conscious self-care for them if we want them to function properly as we age. Each kit comes with a small instruction manual that walks you through self-massage techniques. Pilates in Common will host its first MELT mini-series in April, 2023 and you bet we'll have a series dedicated to the hands in feet later in the year.
(Melt Hand and Foot Kit contents)
Have a question about this post? Leave it in the comments section below!
Happy foot health!
By: Destinie Slavich
Photos by: Srinivas Reddy (B&W Feet) and Destinie Slavich
