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Your toes might be the weakest link in your workout — Here’s the research

Small muscles, big impact: Weak toe muscles could be hindering your performance in the gym and on the sports field

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Are weak toes killing your performance? Do stronger toes mean better gains? Looking at the research, toe strength could be the gym edge many of us are ignoring, and weak toes really could be holding us back. Let’s look at the muscles in your toes and what the research shows.

What are the muscles in your toes?

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You have 20 muscles in your foot that help you stand and move around. Similar to your fingers, your toes also have flexor and extensor muscles that help you balance and maintain stability on your two feet. Your toe muscles are categorized into extrinsic muscles that start higher up your leg and extend down, and intrinsic muscles that originate within your foot.

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Major extrinsic muscles in your toes include the longus muscles for flexion: flexor digitorum longus, extensor hallucis longus, and extensor digitorum longus. Your smaller intrinsic muscles include your lumbricals, flexor digitorum brevis, abductor hallucis, and interossei. The smaller intrinsic muscles support the arches of your feet and finer toe movements. Each of these muscles and muscle groups supports particular movements. For example, the interossei group of muscles spreads your toes apart and brings them together again, while also supporting flexion of the metatarsophalangeal joints.

The research on the benefits of strong toes

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In a study published in the Journal of Human Kinetics, the researchers aimed to investigate how toe muscle strength impacts the ability to change direction in athletes. The study involved 17 young collegiate American football players, and the researchers performed two types of measurements to evaluate toe muscular strength:

  1. Toe flexor strength (toes pointed down) with the metatarsophalangeal joint in the plantar flexed position.
  2. Toe-pushing force (toes bent upward) with the metatarsophalangeal joint in the dorsiflexed position.

Researchers measured the athletes’ ability to change direction using pro-agility and 3-cone tests.

The results

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The research revealed the following:

  • Toe-pushing force with the toes bent upward was linked to better performance on the agility tests, so the athletes with stronger toe-pushing skills could change direction faster and more smoothly.
  • There were no significant correlations between toe flexor strength and the pro-agility and 3-cone tests. These results weren’t observed with toe flexor strength when the toes were pointed down.
  • Neither type of toe strength affected the sprinting speed (running straight ahead).
  • The ability to change direction is more strongly affected by toe muscular strength measured as toe-pushing force with the metatarsophalangeal joint in the dorsiflexed angle (toes bent upward) compared to the toe flexor strength with the metatarsophalangeal joint in the plantar flexed angle (toes pointed down).

The takeaway

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Changing direction quickly is an important skill for sports like football. Working on strengthening those toe muscles and boosting your ‘toe-pushing force’ could help improve your ability to change direction on the sports field. In this particular study, these results are seen with the ‘toe-pushing’ strength, meaning when the toes are bent upward, like when your foot is pushing up off the ground to turn. The researchers recommend training your toe strength in that upward-bent position for best results enhancing your ability to turn quickly and your agility on the field.

Steph Green
Steph Green
Steph Green (Steph Zee) is a singer-songwriter and professional writer with over 12 years of experience in healthcare and… Read Full Bio
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