Every other sport page on this site borrows its agility evidence from one study. That study was done on college football players. Football is also the only sport with a toe injury named after it. So this is the one article where we do not have to reach across sports to say something about toes — the research came to football first.
The study
Seventeen collegiate American football players had their toe strength measured two ways: with the toes curled down (metatarsophalangeal joints plantarflexed) and with the toes lifted (dorsiflexed). They then ran the pro-agility shuttle, the 3-cone drill, and straight sprints.1
Toe push-off force with the toes lifted correlated significantly with both change-of-direction tests. Toe strength with the toes curled did not. Neither measure correlated with sprint time.
The authors' conclusion: the ability to change direction is more strongly affected by toe strength in the dorsiflexed position, and athletes may improve it by training in that position. For a receiver breaking a route, a corner mirroring one, or a back cutting off a block, that is the position the foot is in at the moment that matters.
Two things it does not say. It does not say toe strength makes you faster in a straight line — it found no such relationship. And it is seventeen people, measured once. It shows that toe push-off strength and agility go together; it does not show that training one improves the other. That trial has not been run.
Turf toe: what football does to the big toe
The injury was named in 1976, in a paper titled "Turf-toe: a shoe-surface related football injury."2 It is a sprain of the big toe's metatarsophalangeal joint — the ligaments and plantar plate on the underside — and the mechanism is hyperextension: the forefoot planted, the heel up, and a load driving the big toe backward past its range. A tackler landing on the back of your calf while your toes are on the ground is the textbook version.
Five seasons of NCAA injury surveillance data put numbers on it.3 Running backs and quarterbacks were injured more often than linemen — the authors attributed it to the forefoot stress of explosive cutting and sprinting — and artificial turf carried a higher rate than grass. In the NFL, a review of 71 turf toe injuries found roughly equal numbers on grass and turf, and no measurable drop in player performance ratings after return.4
The positions most exposed are the ones that load the forefoot hardest and most often: receivers, corners, backs. Linemen see it too, from the three-point stance — toes dorsiflexed, driving — but the surveillance data puts the skill positions first.
The part that argues against a toe spacer
Here is where we have to be plain, because it would be easy not to be.
Turf toe is an injury of too much big-toe extension. The established prevention is less of it. Stiffer forefoot plates, carbon or steel inserts, taping that limits how far the toe can bend back. Everything that works for turf toe works by restricting the joint.
A toe spacer is a mobility tool. It opens the toes sideways and holds them there. It has no role in preventing turf toe, and we are not going to invent one. If your position exposes you to it, the conversation is with your equipment staff about plate stiffness, not with us. Anything that made the big-toe joint looser in extension would be working against you, and nothing on this page should be read as encouraging that.
Strength is not mobility
What the seventeen-player study measured was not how far the toes moved. It was how hard they pushed from the lifted position. That is a strength measurement, and strength in the dorsiflexed position is a different thing from range of motion in it.
There is a reasonable mechanical argument — no more than that — that strong toe flexors working in the dorsiflexed position help hold the big-toe joint stable under load. The German group that trained toe flexors for seven weeks found that in tasks where the joint is dorsiflexed and loaded hard, stronger flexors did more.5 Whether that translates into a more stable joint under a tackler's weight has never been tested. We think the argument is sound. We are not going to call it protection.
Where Toe-Rx fits, and where it doesn't
Toe-Rx's working step is this: with the toes held apart, lift them, then press them down into the floor and squeeze them closed against the foam. Lift is dorsiflexion. Press from there is push-off. It is the position the football study isolated, worked against resistance. The spreading is how you get to that position with the muscles that pull the big toe outward engaged — it is the setup, not the point.
Three limits, stated once each:
- The resistance is foam. The seven-week trial loaded toe flexors at 90% of maximum on a dynamometer. Whether foam resistance is enough to produce those gains is untested.
- It is not a turf toe device. See above. If you have had a turf toe injury, the joint's stability is a clinician's call before it is anyone else's, and nothing that presses between the toes goes near a healing plantar plate without their say.
- Not before practice or games. A long static hold in the minutes before explosive work has been shown to reduce maximal force, with the effect growing the longer the hold.6 After, seated, ten minutes, every other day.
And a fourth, which is the site's standing rule: the passive part does nothing. In the one trial that isolated it, wearing a toe separator alone changed nothing over eight weeks; adding the active closing movement changed every measure taken.7 How to use it is here.
The short version
Toe push-off strength with the toes lifted went with agility in college football players — not with sprint speed. Turf toe is the price this sport pays for loading that same joint, and its prevention is stiffness, not mobility. What a toe trainer offers is strength work in the position the study picked out, after the session, with the honest gap that nobody has trained football players' toes and counted their cuts or their injuries. If you play a position that lives on the forefoot, that is what we have.
*These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
References
- Yuasa Y, Kurihara T, Isaka T. Relationship between toe muscular strength and the ability to change direction in athletes. Journal of Human Kinetics. 2018;64:47–55. doi:10.1515/hukin-2017-0183. PMID: 30429898. Read it
17 collegiate American football players. Cross-sectional. - Bowers KD Jr, Martin RB. Turf-toe: a shoe-surface related football injury. Medicine and Science in Sports. 1976;8(2):81–83. PMID: 957935.
- George E, Harris AHS, Dragoo JL, Hunt KJ. Incidence and risk factors for turf toe injuries in intercollegiate football: data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association Injury Surveillance System. Foot & Ankle International. 2014;35(2):108–115. doi:10.1177/1071100713514038. Read it
Five NCAA seasons, 2004–05 through 2008–09. - Outcome of turf toe injuries in NFL players. The Journal of Foot and Ankle Surgery, 2022. Read it
71 injuries; power ratings not significantly different after injury. Authors to be added — see notes. - Goldmann JP, Sanno M, Willwacher S, Heinrich K, Brüggemann GP. The potential of toe flexor muscles to enhance performance. Journal of Sports Sciences. 2013;31(4):424–433. PMID: 23106289.
15 men, 7 weeks. Horizontal jump improved; vertical, walking, running unchanged. Cited here for the dorsiflexed-loading mechanism, not for football. - Revisiting the stretch-induced force deficit: a systematic review with multilevel meta-analysis of acute effects. Journal of Sport and Health Science, 2024. Read it
- Kim MH, Yi CH, Weon JH, Cynn HS, Jung DY, Kwon OY. Effect of toe-spread-out exercise on hallux valgus angle and cross-sectional area of abductor hallucis muscle in subjects with hallux valgus. Journal of Physical Therapy Science. 2015;27(4):1019–1022. doi:10.1589/jpts.27.1019. Read it
