How to Fix & Prevent Bunions Without Surgery!

if you're worried about needing surgery for a bunion in today's video I'm going to show you your best chance of fixing it without having to go under the knife if you don't know who I am my name is will harow and I'm the over 50s specialist physio here at HT physio in farno and today we're going to be talking about how to fix and prevent bunions without the need of surgery now a bunion is a deformity of the first metattoo fenal joint of the foot now if that sounds like gobbley I'm going to show you what that means on my foot model here so this is your foot you can see the underside of the foot here and the top of the foot here now the metat taso fenal joints are these joints here so this is your big toe this is your second toe this is your third fourth and fifth and this here would be where the end of the foot stops and the toes come up from there if that makes sense so this is the air area the first mesaro phalang joint where a bunion occurs an aunion occurs when the foot becomes deformed like this so the big toe starts to cross across the foot we call that a valgus deformity sometimes all of the toes can start to push outwards on the foot and this bone here or this joint here becomes enlarged and arthritic and it causes a big lump on the side of the foot now bunions can be very painful they can make it difficult to wear shoes they can rub they can cause all kinds of misery for people who suffer with them now the key thing for bunions if we can is preventing them before they come about but if you're seeing the first signs of a bunion don't rush to the surgeon quite yet because bunion surgery is notoriously difficult it doesn't have an amazing success rate so if we can do something conservatively we're much better off so now I'm going to show you some tips for how to uh go about improving the bunion deformity of your foot and we can't change the bone but what we can do is we can start to move the mechanics of the foot so that they don't come across so much this area here isn't so tight and hopefully your big toe starts to line up a bit better so I'm going to give you my tips now you're going to have a go at them at home and hopefully it will improve your problem now before I show you the tips it's important to note these are not super suble for everyone this video is not designed to replace the advice you get from a doctor or a Physio and if the exercises I'm going to show you hurt just avoid them they're certainly not suitable for everyone so get checked out before you give them a go but let's have a look at the plan now so there are three major reasons that people can develop bunions the first reason is genetics and some people are just more likely to get them than others we can't do much about that the second problem is poor Footwear so Footwear that compresses your toes into either a point or squashes them together into a tight toe that's a big cause of bunions and we can definitely do something about that and then the third problem that causes bunions is poor foot and lower limb mechanics so if your feet are stiff and tight and not working properly and the muscles higher up the leg are causing your feet to fall inwards and put pressure on the inside of the big toe that can also cause bun too and we can definitely help you fix that so we're going to be focusing on the second two problems and the first one we're going to talk about is your Footwear so as I discussed tight ill-fitting Footwear that squashes the toes together are a bad idea if you want to prevent bunions and this is why women get it more commonly than men it's because they're forced into high heels they're forced into these Court shoes which squash the toes together and make bunions more likely whereas men tend to have slightly wider fitting shoes now the type of shoe I would recommend if you've got a bunion or if you feel you've got one developing is something like this so I've got my grubby pair of Nike Pegasus trainers here I wasn't paid to promote these but these are just my favorite shoe and one of the reasons they're my favorite shoe is because they've got a nice wide fitting area at the front of the foot you can see on the sole how wide this area goes and that's partly because they're running shoes they're built to uh to cushion more of the pressure on the front of the foot but they also have a flexible upper material that means even if my toes make contact with this part they're not going to be compressed by leather or something tougher so I like these shoes but it doesn't mean that these are the best in the world there are many other types that will do a good job for you things like sketches tend to be quite good for the people I treat as well but you want a shoe with a wide fit at the front and preferably a soft upper so that it's not compressing your toes so so now we've sorted your Footwear let's talk about some of the treatment we can do on your feet to help prevent bunions one of the big things we can do is a certain type of massage that you can do at home to help to reduce tightness in the key muscles that can cause bunions so we've got two muscles we want to be able to work on I'm going to show you how to do it in a minute but first I'm going to show you where they are so this is the top of your foot and one of the areas we want to work on is the space between the big toe and the second toe so we have muscles that live in here called the dorsal interos and if they get tight they can contribute to the formation of a bunion and then the other area of the foot we want to work on is called the adductor holis okay and this is the muscle that crosses over the foot it has two heads one goes like this one goes like this and its job is to pull the big toe in okay so if its job is to do this if it gets tight you end up with a pulled in big toe and then that is what can contribute to a bunion so if we can loosen up the adductor holis we can get that big toe hopefully to line up a bit straighter because this muscle won't be pulling in so that's the theory let's have a look at how to do the treatment on those areas now so the first thing we're going to work on is the dorsal inosi which is basically the muscles that live in this Gap here so if you pull your toes up you can see you've got a tendon here and a tendon here and we're looking at the gap between them okay so basically this is the muscle we're trying to treat and you can use one strong finger to do this so what I would recommend you do is find either some moisturizing cream I'm going to use some massage lotion just cuz I've got some to hand but any kind of moisturizer would be fine just take a dip of it on your finger and then you're basically just going to use that to work this Gap here so we're just going to press quite firmly it's just a gentle massage really but we want to be able to feel a little bit of discomfort as if we're loosening that muscle up pressing in that gap between the two bones and working down this space now to make this effective you are going to have to do this quite regularly so I recommend if you want to try this at home you try to do it for at least 5 minutes per day just for for a while to see if this is going to work because this area here is a brilliant uh area to treat to prevent the toe from being pulled in like that so that's the first thing we're going to do is treat this dorsal interus area like that now the second thing we're going to treat is the adductor holis and your adductor holis has a couple of heads one runs across here and one runs down here so rather than trying to find it too specifically I'd recommend you just try and lose loosen up this whole area here now to get to the muscle you have to press quite deeply so for this I'm going to use my thumb so again I'm going to take a dab of uh massage lotion and now I'm just going to press in around this area here just working on the soft tissues just beneath the ball of my foot so if this is my first metatarsal uh fangel joint I'm just coming below it just into this soft area of the foot and this is hopefully going to loosen up the uh the adductor holis the one that pulls my big toe inwards like that and it will stop it from getting tight and doing too much of that job so the zone I'm treating is probably around here all the way up across the metatarsal heads we don't want to be too tough on the bones because you can feel your bones underneath here so just come underneath the bones really you'll be able to find some tight spots and if you do just focus your finger and thumb on those areas giving them a nice squeeze again for a couple of minutes a day just to loosen that area up the next thing we're going to do to try and fix your bunion is to train one of the muscles in the foot that abduct the big toe so we call this the abductor holis and basically what it is is a muscle that goes on the outside of the big toe which its job is to pull the big toe out so remember how we said we don't want the big toe to be Crossing in this muscle helps to pull it the other way so I'm going to show you how to exercise that muscle to improve its control and then stop that bunion from forming let's have a look at the exercise now so this exercise is a crossover between a mobilization and an isometric and an isometric is a contraction of the muscle without any movement happening so what we're trying to do is we're trying to work on the muscle that pulls the big toe outwards and you might think well do I even have a muscle there cuz it's quite a difficult movement to do and that's just because we don't practice it very often so I'll show you how we do this exercise all we're going to do is use a finger so you need to be able to reach your toe and you're going to tuck your finger in this way pull your big toe nice and wide and your job now is to use the muscles in your foot to keep the toe there before it comes back to where it wants to be so again we're going to pull wide contract the foot hold the Toe Hold the toe that's really difficult for me to do because I'm not used to using that muscle so I can only hold it for a few seconds so Pull It Wide hold hold hold hold you can see all my toes are trying to help and then it comes back to the center now it's such a funny little exercise but when you're doing it correctly you'll feel the muscle on the out or the inside of the foot around here the outside of the big toe working really hard and this exercise achieves two goals the first goal is you're using your finger to mobilize The Joint so it isn't stiff and the second goal is we're strengthening that muscle so again out hold and allow it to return again a couple of minutes of practice of this each day should improve the strength here and improve the uh the alignment of your big toe as well now the fifth thing to improve a bunion or to correct one is to use a toe spacer now a toe spacer is something that you would put between your toes that spaces them out like that to put them into the correct position now I don't have any professionally made toe spaces here but I'm going to use a tissue to show you how it can be done without having to get anything uh specifically made so a tissue like this I folded it into four I'm just going to fold it again so it's folded now into eight so it's a square and then we're going to fold it once more like this so now you've got a bit of a wedge like that now what we're going to do is put it between the big toe and the second toe and then we're going to tape it on once it's there I'm going to show you how that looks now so now we've got our wedge of tissue like this what we're going to do is pop it in there just to keep the big toe and the second toe apart now because my toes are reasonably tightly packed that would just stay there if I was to put a sock on but what I would rather do is tape it across my big toe like that or pull it across and then put a strip of micro pore tape just around it here as long as your skin can tolerate that and as we walk around that's now going to keep a nice gap between the big toe and the second toe and it will help to stop that toe from adducting across the foot so this is a really good option for people who just want to experiment with whether a toe spacer would work if you've tried this and it worked really well you can go online and you can find toe spaces that go into the gaps between your toes like this and separate everything they're quite easy to find but this is a quick test to see if one of those would work so placing a folded tissue like that put it across tape it round and you're going to keep those two toes apart so we've done a lot of work with your foot to try and fix and prevent bunions but one of the major causes of bunions is problems with the mechanics higher up the leg and there are two areas that can cause problems one area is poor control control of the ankle and the foot arch which means that as we walk the foot is rolling inwards so you're getting a flat foot and the second problem is weakness in the hips you might be thinking well how do the hips cause a problem with my foot well if your hip is not working your abductors on the side then your thigh bone rolls inwards which rolls the whole foot inwards as well so now I'm going to give you two exercises one for your hip okay to strengthen that area and one for your ankle to lift the arch so the hip exercise is simple it's called the clam and what you're going to do is you're going to lie on your side with your bad foot up at the top or the one that we're working on we want to lie down like this and we want to be turned forward further than feels natural okay so we want this hip to be slightly ahead of this hip you're going to use a hand to stabilize you're going to keep your heels together nothing moves apart from the leg and then we just lift this top knee up towards the ceiling okay and then we pop it back down when we reach our natural limit so if I was to go any higher there if I go there and I keep going I have to roll back so we want to avoid that from happening so keep your hips forward lift the knee and then back down and as I do this exercise I can feel this muscle here working that's a good thing that's what we want and this is the muscle that keeps your knees open when we walk it keeps your knees apart and stops that thigh bone from Crossing in which means it's going to take a lot of pressure off the feet remember if we only treat the foot we're only treating half the problem so this hip exercise is just as important as the exercises in your feet now what I'd recommend you do is work to the point of fatigue several times a day maybe two or three times would be perfect do it on both sides and over time you'll improve your walking and take a lot of pressure off your feet then the final exercise I've got for you is called a standing inversion now your inverter muscles are the ones that do this to the ankle they turn it in like this and we've got your tibialis posterior as the main one it lives down here on the inside of the lower calf now if those muscles aren't working we get the opposite we get this which is foot pronation and that puts a lot of pressure on that first metat tarel which means that a bunion is more likely so to strengthen this muscle we're going to do an exercise that makes us use the tibialis posterior so to make this work I've got a loop of resistance band and I'm just going to slip it around my legs about halfway up the calf like that and I'm going to stand with quite a wide stance okay now what I want to do throughout this exercise is keep my heels and my toes in contact with the ground all I'm going to try and do is lift that Arch like that and then slowly let the arch come down to the floor now it's important to try and keep your hips relaxed with just using the muscles in the ankles to lift up and come back down so you can see my knees are not turning my knees are staying hopefully facing forward throughout and I'm pulling out onto the band lifting that Arch and if I'm doing this correctly the area I should be getting an ache is either the inside of of the foot so the ball of the foot or coming up the inside of the calf and lower leg so what I would do is this exercise to the point of fatigue similar to the clam so I'd do maybe 15 20 of these in a row try and come back to it two or three times per day and that's going to really fix those foot mechanics if you're serious about fixing or preventing a bunion so that's how to fix or prevent a bunion without surgery I hope you found this video useful if it's been helpful please do leave me a comment below and let me know your thoughts and if you want to get more from me you can pick up a copy of my book it's called thriving Beyond 50 and you can find it on Amazon using the link below anyway thank you so much for watching I really appreciate your time and I'll speak to you on the next video

Channel: HT Physio – Over-Fifties Specialist Physio

Views: 385,752

Keywords: Farnham, Surrey, Physio, Physiotherapy, Knee Pain, Health, Exercise, Wellness, senior health, Over fifty, flat feet, foot pain, healthy feet, podiatry, physical therapy, plantar fasciitis, achilles tendon, achilles tendinitis, achilles tendinopathy, over-fifties, foot health, foot care, stretches for over-fifties, bob & brad, athlean X, foot exercises, calf stretch, foot pain relief, plantar fascia pain relief, foot pain walking, feet, bunion

Id: NrguGSvO3h0

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024