If you closely watch babies for some time, you will find them moving their toes freely. If you try to do the same, you will be disappointed. This happens because as adults, we wear tight shoes and other footwear for such a long time that we lose the strength, mobility, and elasticity of our toes. This is where toe yoga comes in.
A toe yoga is the type of yoga that restores your foot function. It includes easy poses and stretches that you can practice while doing house chores such as cooking or washing dishes. Also known ‘toega,’ toe yoga exercise has the potential to restore the strength and mobility of toes back to what you had in your childhood.
Toe Yoga Benefits
Yes, it is very easy to learn and practice Toe yoga. But that doesn’t make it any less beneficial than other intense types of yoga. Here is a list of some toe yoga benefits that you get by practising it regularly at your home or gym:
- Improved Mobility Of Toes: Starting from the school uniform to office attire, we wear tight shoes for more than half of our life. Imagine the effect of this on your toes’ mobility. Toe yoga stretches the muscles present around your toes and gives them their mobility back.
- Relief From Foot & Toe Pain: If you have put a strain on the muscles of your toes or have injured your toe, you can do this yoga for toe pain relief. Sometimes when we put on shoes for 12-15 hours, our toes start to hurt. You can do this yoga for toe pain in such conditions. What yoga poses will do is ease the tension between muscles and relax them. However, you should keep in mind that toe balance yoga might not prove to be much beneficial in serious injuries or deformities of toes.
- Strengthen Your Foot: We rarely become mindful of our feet, soles, and toes until they start to hurt. But doing toe yoga makes you mindful of your feet. If you intensify the stretch in toe yoga exercise a bit, you will find that the spreading of toes massages your feet and makes the muscles of soles strong.
- Improve Practice of Other Types of Yoga: Underused and clumsy toes often make it difficult for people to do an intense lower-body yoga workout. There are various yoga poses that need you to balance your feet in a proper alignment and spread your toes. If your toes and feet have become clumsy because of putting on shoes for long hours, doing yoga toe stretches is a great way to activate them. Once your toe muscles are in use again, you will be better able to do various other types of yoga asanas.
- Reduces Chances of Ankle Injury: A larger number of people suffer from ankle pain. The major reason behind ankle pain is Plantar fasciitis - the inflammation of fibrous tissue in your foot called the plantar fascia. Toe yoga helps you in lengthening and stretching this connective tissue and getting relief from ankle pain.
- Stimulate Lower Body Meridians: As you might already know, our various meridians either begin or end in the toes. When you stretch your toes with yoga toe stretches, these lower body meridians also get stimulated. A few examples of meridians that are stimulated by yoga toes for men and women are the liver, gallbladder, kidney, spleen, stomach, and urinary bladder.
The most underrated benefit of toe balance yoga is that you do not need to take out extra time to do it. You do not even need a gym space to practice yoga toes for men and women. Learn it through the guide we have mentioned below or join online yoga classes. You can also incorporate it into your workout at home.
How To Do Toe Yoga
You can do toe yoga for bunions treatments and improve your running efficiency too. Down below, we have mentioned four toe yoga poses out of which the first two are toe yoga for runners and the last two are for bunions treatment.
Toe Yoga For Runners
- Big Toe Lift
- Spread your feet and toes out on the mat.
- Pick up your big toe while toes 2 to 5 down and relax, hold it for about 2 seconds.
- Repeat it 20 times and then raise toes 2 to 5 while keeping the big toe down and relaxed.
- Make sure that you don’t pronate the foot while picking up the big toe.
- Hold the small toes for about 2 seconds and then do 20 reps.
- Bear Squat to Downward Dog Dynamic Stretch
- Kneel down on a yoga mat, sit on your heels with toes curled inside.
- Now, rock on the side on your curled toes so that your foot muscles, tendons, and calf muscles get stretched.
- Come forward onto your limbs and make a tabletop position.
- Press the hips up, keep toes curled inside, put heels back on the mat, and get back into the downward dog posture.
- Hold the pose for a second, drop down on the mat to your limbs, and do 5 reps.
Toe Yoga For Bunions
- Toe Points and Curls
- Sit on a chair keeping your feet at a distance of at least 6 inches from the floor.
- Now, gradually point and curl your toes inwards.
- Do 2 to 3 sets of toe points and curls with 20 reps.
- Toe circles
- Sit on a chair, lean forward, and grab a big toe of one leg.
- Make a circle with toe clockwise 15 to 20 times.
- Now, stop and make 15 to 20 circles again, this time anti-clockwise.
- Do 2 to 3 sets of toe circles to get the best results.
Conclusion
Toe yoga is a set of some easy yoga poses that help you stretch your toe muscles and strengthen them. If you do toe yoga only a few minutes a day, you will get benefits like improved mobility of toes, relief from toe pain, and stimulation of lower-body meridians.
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