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As someone who has studied the main causes of bunions after struggling with one myself, I feel inclined to share what I’ve found to be true to hopefully bring awareness to this issue.

I mentioned in my last article that I am going to be writing more about bunions from now on and that I plan to make a simple, downloadable program on how to solve bunions, just like I have with My Plantar Fasciitis Program.

If you’re struggling with a bunion, it is likely that multiple of these points mentioned are causing your pain because they all make each other worse and you’ll see why after reading.

Here are the 3 main causes of bunions that I’ve found from personal experience and further research:

Shoes with Narrow Toe Boxes

I’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about how conventional footwear, what we wear on our feet every day, offers nothing but a narrow toe box to our feet.

There is no standard footwear that accommodates someone who has a naturally wide foot or the natural toe splay that occurs during load-bearing activities.

This is of course, why we have to look to alternatives like barefoot shoes. But often, the damage has been done from conventional footwear and we have to undo it.

The shoes we first put our feet into cause bunions because they literally pinch our toes together in a confined space and it forces the bones in our feet to conform to an unnatural position. 

This is the most easy to understand cause of bunions, and likely the most prominent cause as well. You can literally watch your toes go from comfortable and spread out to pinched together and uncomfortable as they enter your shoes.

Looking at your bare foot sitting next to your shoes, it’s not uncommon to wonder how they’re going to fit in there. This is why a shoe-sizing test was popularized by Dr Ray McClanahan called the shoe liner test, and I wrote about how to use it here.

Finding shoes that are your proper size sounds like a no brainer but with the options we have today, it certainly isn’t.

In the vast majority of shoes, your feet will slide in and the toes will immediately have to conform to its narrow shape. This means the toes will learn to take up the position they sit in all day and soon, it becomes their learned position.

They are all pinched together, can’t generate much power in push-off anymore, don’t spread during weight-bearing anymore, and can’t help you balance as well as they should. All this, and then the obvious problem comes along, which are painful bunions.

Poor Ankle Mobility (Lack of Dorsiflexion)

Poor ankle mobility is very common with people who wear conventional footwear.

It is specifically dorsiflexion that people normally lack, which is the foot’s ability to bend straight back towards the knee. This is the motion needed in the ankle when you are squatting or lunging.

Dorsiflexion is a unique movement to the body because it is a lot more necessary than people realize. Sure, it allows us to walk and run with a longer stride, perform a proper deep squat, and run faster with more efficiency. But most importantly, it keeps our foot from defaulting to more pronation.

Pronation is the natural shock absorption strategy of the foot and it works very well. What doesn’t work well, however, is overpronation.

This is when the foot can no longer regulate its own pronation because the ankle cannot dorsiflex properly, therefore it defaults to creating more mobility somewhere else. The ankle compensates for its lack of dorsiflexion by mobilizing the foot to pronate even more.

If the foot isn’t able to form a strong arch, which is oftentimes the case, the foot has no mechanism to stop the pronation from becoming excessive. This causes the foot to turn out so the person walks with a duck foot. While walking, the foot lands, overpronates, and drags to push off from the big toe while it is slanted, which can quickly irritate the big toe joint where bunions form.

This process is very inefficient and makes the foot spend more time in contact with the ground, versus having good dorsiflexion and getting a quick bounce off the ground.

This extended time on the ground and the unnatural slant from the foot turning out means the push-off from the big toe is in a compromised position, pushing it in towards the other toes which is irritating to it (pictured below).

Notice the push-off of my back foot. The big toe is forced to push off on a slant which is an irritating position for an existing bunion or a toe that is already pinched in.

Flat Feet (from Arches Collapsing)

When the arches collapse and you develop flat feet, this has a negative effect on your foot stance.

Normally, your weight would be evenly distributed throughout the outer edges of your feet from the heel to the ball of the feet and toes.

With flat feet and collapsed arches, your weight is distributed through the inside of the feet.

The weight is naturally held on the outside of the feet and it pushes your 2 big toes toward each other in this stance. This keeps all your toes properly aligned with the big toes positioned wide.

With the flat foot stance, the weight being on the inside of the feet pushes the big toes away from each other. This puts a lot of pressure on the big toes because they are getting pushed into a bunion position from its stance on the ground. 

Just like we talked about with having poor ankle mobility, your feet will find themselves overpronating and side-loading your big toes (pictured above).

This contributes to additional pressure on the big toe as it becomes a continual process of irritating it while walking or running.

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