How to Prevent Bunions from Getting Worse | Yoga For Bunions

this is both awareness of the feet but it's also overcoming bunions which is really important and very helpful there's a muscle it's an abductor it goes from the side of your big toe across the Mount of the big toe and attaches to your inner heel right here it's called abductor hallucis and it both supports the arch of the foot but it also when it contracts makes the big toe point straight forward and so when a person develops a bunion it's most often as the arch of the foot drops down it starts to overstretch abductor hallucis and then the toe just starts to swing off to the side plus there's a band of muscles between big toe and little toe at the sole of the foot as that gets over stretched the knuckles of the toes the metatarsal start to spread apart and that makes the toes point inwards so there's a weakness between these two points big toe and little toe and there's a weakness between big toe mound and inner heel and since there's not a lot of support from the ligaments we need to get to keep those muscles strong now there's a very simple exercise for doing this if I take the feet forward in front of me I'm gonna first lift all of my toes up that just allows me to ground the mound of the big toe head of the monitor also goes down and it works like a seesaw as the mound of the big toe goes down the other end of the bone lifts up a little bit better you'll often see people sometimes they have a corn on the top of their foot because we have a habit of kind of grabbing with the toes a little bit especially in the hips are shifted forward and the more we kind of grab with the toes you can see how the knuckle of my big toe goes up and again like a seesaw as the knuckle of the big toe goes up the arch of the foot drops down because these muscles lose strength so the point of lifting the toes is first of all as you lift the toes the mound of big toe goes down and that allows the other end of the metatarsal collapse stage one I lift all of my toes stays to keeping the other toes lifted two keeps the arch strong see if you can just stretch your big toe forward and down can't see what happens in your foot so you have the feet forward so you got all four hoses pee down lift your toes up so that lifts the arch keeping the four toes lifted just reach your big toe forward like you're trying to make it longer reaching out to touch something and see what's happening yeah and your jaw muscles you feel how that muscles cramping right there it is a brain exercise to isolate them yeah yeah this one side does it better than the other so look yeah I cramps the the cramp is a sign that that muscle is a little bit over stretched so when you try to contract it it's like I can't quite do it and then it has a temper tantrum we call it a cramp so this this becomes your morning shuddering goes for your big toe we have your glass of orange juice you lift the toes and just reach out for the big toe and when you watch the big toe when I lift it up it goes sideways when I reach it out it pulls towards the middle it's getting abducted away from the middle of the foot as that muscle gets stronger it tends to arrest bunions or even reverse bunions and I've had a number of students have avoided surgery for bunions by simply worth working on strengthening that muscle people do develop the bump and even the bone growth the more extremely the toe goes over the side but as you strengthen the abductor hallucis it often reduces that bump and starts to pull the toe back into place so it makes sense so far yeah this this really does work and a lot of students have had a lot of success with it and you'll see things on the internet where they have things were like if you just stretch your toes like that it reduces a bunion just stretching the big toes duck towards each other doesn't do it because it doesn't make any muscles stronger if you've got a more extreme bunion and when you stretch out through the toe it doesn't really draw towards the middle you can put a little padding between the toes and then get a rubber band off of your bunch of broccoli tie your big toes together and do a little sack race with your big toes let them go up and down together and that starts to strengthen the inner edge of the foot a little side point with that some people have what's called a Morton's toe and a Morton's toe is when your second toe is longer than your big toe it's a structural thing yeah yeah that complicates things for the feed especially because when you look at the I have one friend has a Morton stone the knuckle of her big toe is back here in the second toe is forward so the second toe starts to function like a big toad debt tends to exacerbate yeah that tends to exacerbate the bunions you can still work the abductor muscle it's just the complications of pain at the sole of foot become worse Morton's neuroma is when the pressure on the nerve of the second toe increases because it's longer you start to get numbness in the foot which is simply pressure on that nerve it's good to work on increase in the transverse arch of the foot by stretching it this way because otherwise it tends to flatten down at the base of the big toe and so I'm gonna put together a couple actions with the foot the first being working with the edge of the big toe and then the second so number one is I lift the big toe all the toes up which just the big toe forwarded down so you do a little sack race like that with your big toe that starts to increase the strength of the inner arch of the foot it maintains the arch and it reduces the Bunya part too as you lift all of the toes up and see if you can reach just your little toe down out and down keeping the others lifted and the fourth toe often travels with the little toe cuz they share a tendon so they're often travel buddies but as you do a little toe also watch what happens to your little fingers they start to fight this is another bring your ears wiggle slightly chill and there is a muscle that's used to be called the peroneal muscle to be eleris there's a short one and a long one it goes from your little toe up through the outer edge of the shin so it creates this kind of racing stripe at the outer edge of the shin this is an important muscle for stabilizing your ankle so you don't twist it because we don't have a lot of muscles on the outside of the ankle and when those ligaments are loose and we tend to twist the ankle more and more so working the little toe helps to stabilize the ankle yeah and it goes yeah it goes all the way up there because that line who goes up it's part of what stabilizes the knee and when it's weak the IT band gets tighter and it continues through the outer hamstring to the butt right there hmm yeah the pinky's not yeah for you that's no big deal because that's that's more mobile there some people develop a bunion on the little toe going that way but that's not the case with you so that muscles working well and that's good for balance yeah the pinky toe basically stabilizes the ankle because when your arch drops and pronates the inside of the foot gets over stretched and the outside of the ankle gets pinched and so you start it's it starts to affect the bones often people develop little fractures in their second toe because the weight shifts to the second toe or they get a pinching on the outside of the ankle somebody who supinate the foot where the weight goes too much to the outer heel you can see how much that over stretches the outer ankle so that person's more likely to twist their ankle or polar ankle or sprain it and at the same time there's a pinching of the bones on the inside of the ankle so depending which way it goes you can have pinching and compression on one side and overstretching on the other if we die and notice here supinated foot the weights on the outer heel pronated foot the weights on the ball of the big toe if I balance the weight between big toe and outer heel that centers the foot and basically opens up intones both sides but it's that habit of falling from one side to one side or the other that has an effect upon the ankle plus starts to cause it twisting inside the knee goes right up to the hip yes yeah the abductor yeah you actually kind of what got kind of what I call a moon toe where it actually goes you out to the inside and that can often make the big toe very stiff where it kind of does a Crescent to the inside and now do you have difficulty lifting the toe it's a little bit stiff yeah because it stiffens the toe and and often people because the toe doesn't want to bend enough and walking they kind of roll to the outer edge of the foot to avoid that and that could affect the ankle I'd have to see exactly what you do but it does make a difference and I think if you've got that's sort of half cool until where I'm exaggerating here as a ground the big toe and actually concentrate more on the action from inner heel to little toe that'll start to release some of the tension the big toe so you don't have to do so much of extending the big toe but rather work on the little toe side of the foot and that helps to loosen some of the stiffness and also you will have students that their toe is like this from wearing flip-flops or whatever and you say lifter you left your big toe and they're like I can't do that it doesn't move and the knuckle can come up so much that the toe gets stiff and doesn't want to lift anymore to reestablish that the person can certainly bend the big toe and if I give some resistance here with my finger and then lift the toe up against that resistance eating entire little rubber band around your big toe and make this your little weight lifting action Owen I already got tiny barbells from my big toe and do barbell lifting so you can get the muscle to work like this and it's basically getting the big toe bone to start to slide around the metatarsals the first action is to promote this that starts to mobilize the toe then the person can take the foot down to the floor give a little resistance to the big toe and then start to lift the big toe up against that resistance again just enough that it's like a little tiny barbell and then that starts to mobilize the big tone is the big toe moves then the mound of the big toe comes down it starts to work better so you can develop the mobility in the toe I'm not the biggest fan of flip-flops because flip-flops encourage you you know got that little post there they encourage you to squeeze your toes together to keep the flip-flop on your foot that starts to weaken the arch by getting these toes to pinch together and then the knuckle of the toe gets stuck other stuff like Birkenstocks you can do or whatever it's just that little post in between starts to cause problems for the feet overall the gold-standard if you get the first two points let's take the feet forward lift all of your toes up keep the middle toes lifted and reach your big and little toe out and down keeping the middle three lifted then watch what you watch what your tongue does crazy yeah and that starts to create a transverse arch across the foot we've got an arch at the cuboids and then this arch here and then you start to feel the four corners of the feet big toe little toe inner heel outer heel it's that spreading action this starts to maintain that arch it takes a lot of the soreness out of the foot you can support that by taking the foot and stretching it and sometimes when the toes tend to curl up and kind of like hammer toes it's basically because both sides of the torah' contracting it once you just get in there and manually stretch your toes one way and it's also good to stretch the toes in the other direction because we do a lot of poses like lunge pose where the toes are tucked under and we stretch like this we do other stretches for the soles of the feet we do perhaps a little bit too much of that kind of stretching and not enough stretching in the opposite direction you hear the pop from overdoing that even our shoes are designed to have a little 10 degree elevation of the toes so they stay looking nice like you look at attic shoes and your toes are up slightly so that's just teaching the top of the foot to stay contracted and it starts to pull the padding off the mounds of the toes and you can start to get sore feet just from the padding at the mounts of the toes becoming less and less by the toes always pulling in this direction so when you do this stretch curling the toes forward even popping the knuckles that gets the facet to go back over the mounds of the toes and create a little transverse arch and then your feet maintain their padding and they stay happier so yes you can stretch the toes in one direction it's also good to stretch them in the other which releases the ankle so you can do things like your asana and the others poses the stretch in front of the ankle you

Channel: Yoga International

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Keywords: Yoga for bunions, bunion, bunions, foot pain, yoga for foot pain, bunion exercises, yoga therapy for bunions, therapeutic yoga, yoga for feet, yoga for healthy feet, foot yoga, yoga for toes, yoga for bunion, how to get rid of a bunion, bunion pain relief, foot, feet, Yoga International, Doug Keller, corrective exercise for bunions, healthy feet, foot anatomy, yoga therapy for feet, orthotics, remove bunions naturally, treatment for bunions, bunion reversal exercises

Id: 7XrnnQcdHws

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 19 2019