A Day in the Life of Amy's Toes

by Amy Ippoliti, yoga instructor and ToeSox ambassador

photo courtesy Taro Smith; Click for full image

The Challenge: Wear five toe socks and sandals throughout the day. See what happens. Since I started wearing five toe socks and sandals that spread my toes, I’ve noticed that my feet are definitely getting healthier - my toes are spreading and straightening much more. For example, I used to need my hands to place my toes into the compartments, but now I can wriggle them in hands-free! Why would you want to spread your toes? Wouldn’t that make it harder to fit into fancy shoes? You bet it would! But fancy shoes with pointy toes and narrow foot beds can wreak havoc on your toes and feet creating not only foot issues, but problems up through the kinetic chain into the knees, lower back and onward all the way up to the neck. I wanted to prove to myself that the sandals and socks were really working so using my iPhone, I snapped photos of my feet from sunrise to sunset to see how the use of five toe socks and sandals was impacting the shape of my feet. Armed with ToeSox Sandals and Bella Grip ToeSox, I embarked on the day, iPhone ready: 6:30am Starting at sunrise, I woke and snapped a shot. As you can see, my toes are curled in, circulation is not that prominent, and my metatarsals are narrow. 7:30am While I got ready for a hike, I wore the Bellas around the house as slippers to let the wild toe spreading begin. 9:00am To hike, I chose to wear the Bellas inside my sneakers. While on the mountain we stopped to do some breathing and meditation and I snapped this shot out of the sneakers. 11:00am This was taken after the hike. It’s clear the hike increased my foot circulation, but wearing sneakers definitely made my toes curl in again – however not as much as at 6:00am. You can see that my metatarsals started to widen and my toes were slightly less curled in, I think because of wearing the five toe socks inside the shoes! 11:30am I slipped on a pair of the Reina Five Toe Sandals to get some gardening work done to keep the spreading action going. 12:15pm Then it was off on the bike in the Zuma Five Toe Sandals to check out the farmer’s market on my way to a long yoga practice with friends. Toes are looking good, and there are continued signs of widening metatarsals. 4:30pm After yoga practice the feet show the most dramatic change in the day – increased circulation, broadening of the metatarsals, widely spread toes and much less curling of the toes. This is to be expected after yoga, and yet I’m pretty sure all that spreading leading up to the practice had to have helped! 5:00pm It was getting a bit nippy out so I wore some Bella ToeSox I had at the studio inside my sandals for the bike ride home. 9:30pm Upon bedtime, I snapped the final results of my whole day. My metatarsals remained broad, the toes much more straight and spread out, and a healthy but settled circulation in the feet was noticeable. Conclusion It was very cool to see the progressive results of wearing five toe products on my feet throughout the day. Intentionally, I did not actively spread my toes for any of the pictures – I kept it honest! It’s clear that five toe socks and sandals make a dramatic difference in the appearance of the feet by giving them the chance to spread out into anatomical neutral. I also felt the difference physically with each progressive picture. The combination of the wider foot bed and five toe compartments clearly helps counteract the narrowing that happens to our feet in regular shoes. This process also showed me what a great combination practicing yoga and wearing five toe socks is for foot health.
“This was a fascinating project and totally satisfied my inner nerd! But dude, yoga practice and ToeSox is the way to go for the feet, I am convinced!” - Amy