WHAT ARE TOE SPACERS?

Toe spacers are a nifty little invention, that are designed to do exactly what they sound like – space out those toes of yours! A lot like the toe spacer you may have used when painting your toe nails – however these are made out of squishy silicone that makes the gadget more functional (so you can weight bear easily wearing them). When you slip your toes through the gaps in the silicone, you’ll feel a firm-ish block in between each space that is designed to widen the gap between adjacent toes.

Why should I give them a try?

The toe spacer is designed to improve the health of your foot. In this modern day, our choice in footwear often limits how we use our toes when walking/running/standing. By widening through the toes we are widening through our base, which helps to wake up the muscles controlling the foot that we may not have been activating prior – this is thought to improve our balance, posture and alignment. Furthermore toe spacers can help to restore greater foot mobility and strength, by stretching out the muscles of the foot and realigning the toes. In doing so they have been shown to help with conditions such as bunions and plantar fasciitis!

How can I give them a go?

Start off wearing them for 30minutes at a time just in your day to day, then build it up from there. In general, it is good to also combine these with some TOGA (a.k.a. toe-yoga). Try these two exercises:

1. Scrunch and spread:
   • Take your shoes off, and sit down
   • Scrunch all your toes as close together as possible and hold for 1-2secs, then
   • Open up through your toes as wide as possible and hold for another 1-2 secs
   • Scrunch and spread at least 5 more times
2. Toe lift off
   • Stand up with your feet hip width apart and your weight distributed evenly between both (bare) feet
   • Lift your big toe from the ground, hold for 1-2secs then bring it back to neutral. Then lift all your other toes aside from your big toe up off the ground, and hold for 1-2secs.
   • Alternate between these 2 movements around 5 times.

Lastly, its important that if you are trying to improve the mobility, strength and overall function of the feet and toes that you’re not wearing shoes that cramp that lovely foot of yours! Spending more time barefoot & transitioning to barefoot shoes are really great for this as they have a wide toe box that promotes natural foot biomechanics. See our other article here for more information on barefoot shoes!

Read to to try our using toe spacers? Grab our Free You Feet Kit from our online Shop!