This is all called the windlass effect, or windlass mechanism, and there are diagrams here if you’re interested. So you rock onto your toes, lifting them and pulling the rubber band taut, and then when you push off with your toes, you release all that energy and are sprung forward. Making it taut allows you to lift your heel off the ground, giving your foot a lot of potential energy: that rubber band is just waiting to be sprung free. The way to make it taut is to do what you just did: raise your toes. When you first land a step on your heel, and then when your midfoot hits the ground, your plantar fascia is loose, like a floppy rubber band. (Photo: Maximilian Schönherr /CC BY-SA 3.0) Feel the muscle on the bottom of your foot tightening? That muscle is a flat ligament called the plantar fascia, and it connects the base of your toes to your heel.Ĭomputer simulation of a human walk cycle.
Try this out with an experiment: Raise your big toe as high as you can. It has to be a shock absorber at first, but then it has to propel us forward. Our walking style forces the foot to become a bunch of different things in different phases. But this is far from the norm unless you consciously try to make a gigantic shift in the way you move, you’ll be doing a heel-striking gait. The fairly recent trend of barefoot running, including those gaudy toe-shoes, tries to overturn all of that and place the initial force on the forefoot.
Walking and running is, basically, falling down and catching yourself over and over. Then they have to lift up the heel, levering you forward onto your toes, before the toes push you off into the next step. The muscles of the hindfoot and midfoot, like the achilles tendon and the various plantar muscles on the bottom of the foot, absorb the force from the ground, acting like shocks in a car. Then as you roll forward, the flat bottom of your foot hits the ground. This is sometimes called “heel-striking.” The extremely hard, tough, rigid hindfoot absorbs the initial impact. In what orthopedic surgeons still mostly think of as a “standard gait,” the impact of the ground starts from the back and ends up in the front. He splits the foot into three basic segments: the hindfoot (the heel and ankle), the midfoot (the arch and ball), and the forefoot (the toes). “As you go from the back of your heel to the front of your toes, each segment of the foot becomes more adaptable and less rigid,” says Dr. To understand why our toes are so small and shitty, we have to take a look at the foot as a whole, and see how we walk and run.Įlephant toes. Humans are somewhere in the middle we have, with few exceptions, very small but distinct toes, one of which (the big toe) is substantially larger and stronger than the others, but none of which provide very much gripping ability. (Both those animals walk on their tiny toes, making them both a type of animal called a “digitigrade.”) Then there are primates like the gibbon, with long, floppy feet boasting five very long and supple toes, including one thumb-like opposable finger. Cats and dogs have very small toes compared with the size of their feet.
Think of an elephant, with toes barely distinguishable from the rest of the trunk-like foot. Humans join most of the animal kingdom in the digits, of which there is great variety and size. Terry Philbin, a board-certified orthopedic surgeon and spokesman for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons who focuses exclusively on the foot and ankle, finally took time to explain the meaning of our toes. In reporting this story, I contacted a number of podiatrists and orthopedic surgeons who declined to comment, presumably too busy to ponder the lower digits. They’re lousy at grabbing things, they break easily, and they look, in a pure aesthetic sense, weird.Īre they the appendix of the foot, worthless remnants from our ape days just waiting to wreak havoc? “What is the point of these garbage toes?,” I wondered. I saw ridiculous mutant-finger-like protuberances coming out of my foot, part of them covered with useless nails that seem to need clipping much more often as I get older. Not long ago, after I accidentally kicked the radiator next to my bed and brutally stubbed my toe, I looked down.
What are these for? (Photo: Andy/Public Domain)
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