The big toe is incredibly important to human locomotion, athletic performance, and everyday movement. British computational primatologist Bill Sellers calls the big toe our, “primary evolutionary adaptation” that distinguishes us from our ape cousins! In comparison to the great apes, we have a short-ish big toe that’s in alignment with the other toes. In contrast, other primates have longer, “opposable” big toes–distinctly separated from the other toes–just like our opposable thumbs on our hands. This is great for climbing on trees, while our shorter, aligned big toes greatly inhibit our “arboreal” abilities. The big toe was one of the last parts of the human body to evolve, and helped us come down out of trees to become the greatest endurance athletes on the planet.
Even when standing still, the big toe and its finely tuned receptors have a strong influence on static balance. Stand barefoot with your feet pointing forward and then close your eyes. Pay attention to the incredible sensitivity and nuanced movements of the big toe (as well as the other toes and the arch) to help keep you balanced. When the big toe becomes weak and dysfunctional after a lifetime of restriction in shoes, balance can become unstable. Hence, we see the shocking statistic that the number-one cause of demise among Americans age 65 and over is falling and related injuries. According to healthinaging.org, 18-33% of elderly people who fall and break a hip are dead within one year. Honing and preserving balance is one of the fundamental pillars of functional fitness and longevity, but it is often overlooked–even by devoted fitness enthusiasts.
When moving, the big toe plays a pre-eminent role in impact absorption, balancing moving bodyweight, and providing takeoff propulsion. At impact, the big toe absorbs an amazing 40-60% of your bodyweight, and 3-5 times bodyweight load while running. The extension of the big toe at impact activates the flattening of the arch and the pronation of the foot during the walking and running stride. This is how the body absorbs impact gracefully and harnesses rotational kinetic energy for a powerful takeoff. When the big toe dorsiflexes to initiate the takeoff phase of the walking or running stride, it creates tension that travels up the leg and into the gluteus muscle group, allowing them to engage optimally for forward propulsion. This engagement is vitally important, as the glutes are the largest and most powerful muscle group in the body. If your glutes don’t activate when running or during other complex athletic activity, you have much less force production and stability, so you will likely perform worse and certainly increase your injury risk.
At takeoff, the big toe is the last part of the foot to leave the ground, and it dorsiflexes under tremendous load to unleash all that kinetic energy for a powerful takeoff. A strong and functional big toe helps prevent strain or inappropriate shear forces to other parts of the foot or the lower extremities, while a weak or constricted big toe inappropriately disperses impact load to other areas like the Achilles tendon and the knee joint.
In order to function properly, the big toe must be able to move dynamically through multiple planes and independently from other toes. This means any shoe that encases all the toes into a single box, even a “wide toe box” shoe, is inhibiting the functionality of the big toe. Simply put, shoes cause our big toes to become weak, rigid, and atrophied. This causes undesirable alterations to our gait pattern and a chain reaction of excess load and dysfunction on other joints and connective tissue. Over time, it’s common to develop serious medical conditions like arthritis and bone deformities, especially the extremely common “runner’s hallux” condition, which is stiffness and osteoarthritis in the big toe that’s believed to be driven by running long distances in running shoes with cramped toe boxes.
Going barefoot or wearing Peluvas as often as possible in daily life will get your big toe back in the game, and literally make you more human. It’s also helpful to point your feet forward on every stride and actively engage the big toe for pushoff, as you may have developed compensations over time where the big toe is too passive. Often this is revealed with a duck-footed standing, walking, and running technique, where the big toe is de-emphasized during the gait pattern.