The Toe Box of Your Shoes is Critical to Your Health

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The toe box of a shoe is unsurprisingly, the part of the shoe where the laces end that holds your toes.

It is very important that this part of the shoe be wide. In fact, it should be the widest part of the shoe because then it will allow your toes to splay as wide as they need to. Our feet are naturally widest at the ends of our toes when we’re born. 

Unfortunately, we have a huge problem in our footwear culture today of wearing shoes that severely limit how wide our toes can splay because the toe boxes in our shoes are so narrow.

In many shoes today, the toe box is the most narrow part of the shoe, the exact opposite of what it should be. Because of this, many of us have suffered or will suffer from all kinds of conditions caused by foot and toe deformity (more on these later).

Why Wear a Wide Toe Box Shoe?

The reason you want to wear shoes that have a wide enough toe box is so that your toes can splay fully. This allows our toes to function at full strength, giving us the ability to build strong arches and feet that are resilient and provide us with sturdy balance, agility, and posture. Much of this function comes from the big toe since it is connected to the biggest muscles running through the arch of the foot. 

When we don’t have full toe splay (aka our toes are pinched together), the toes get weak and won’t function properly. This is where conditions like bunions, overpronation, plantar fasciitis, hammertoes, and many more come into play. It is best to think of this process as a domino effect that can be devastating if not cared for properly. 

For a while, I was managing multiple foot conditions at once, specifically a bunion and plantar fasciitis.

What I didn’t understand at the time but later came to realize was that they all stemmed from the same problem: my big toe was getting pushed in too far by my shoes.

Many people don’t realize that multiple problems might be caused by the same thing and subsequently, can all be fixed by addressing that one problem. People with bunions are also very susceptible to getting plantar fasciitis and I was no exception to this.

What Happened to Me

First came the bunion which I noticed as I got more involved in taekwondo. I remember sitting out of a couple drills and sparring sessions because my big toe joint was hurting. I really didn’t like doing this but it felt necessary because I had to be extra careful with how I kicked with that leg.

Then, it only took one incident to create enough trauma to my foot to leave me with a painful case of plantar fasciitis. I was devastated when this happened and left very confused about why my feet were suddenly failing me. These issues were very new to me at the time and I couldn’t figure out for a while what was going wrong.

However, when I addressed the real problem, my toes being pinched together, I suddenly started feeling better on both fronts. The way I did this was by going barefoot more often, stretching my toes out more often, and most importantly, switching myself over to minimalist footwear altogether.

The first minimalist shoes I tried were the Hanas by Xero Shoes and it felt like a miracle when I could walk pain-free again. The large toe box they offer was one of the biggest draws that made me want to try them out and it was 100% worth it. I still wear them today as they’ve kept my feet feeling better than ever.

What happens to your feet with traditional footwear in a nutshell:

1. The shoes you constantly wear pinch your toes together because the toe box is so narrow.
2. Your big toe gets pushed in and learns to stay that way.
3. You no longer have have mobility and function out of your big toe so you can’t form a strong arch anymore.
4. Your arches collapse, and they no longer have the strength to withstand the natural process of pronation, so it quickly becomes overpronation.
5. Overpronation brings about tons of problems: ankle instability, plantar fasciitis.

Avoid this destructive domino effect altogether by switching yourself over to minimalist footwear. Especially if you’re someone who is already in some kind of foot or leg pain, you’re going to have to make this switch to undo the damage of conventional footwear sooner or later. Better to do it early on.

I do recommend that people try Xero Shoes as a starter minimalist shoe because they have all the necessary features to get your foot functioning like it should: wide toe box, no toe spring, lightweight, zero drop sole, and flexible.

They have worked incredibly well for me (I’m up to 6 pairs of them) and many others as well.