Two at-home tests can tell you a lot. The first is what McDowell calls toe yoga: Sit barefoot in a chair, lift just your big toe while the other four stay flat on the floor, and then reverse it\u2014big toe down, little toes up. \u201cMost people can\u2019t do that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The second is a credit-card test. Slide a card under your big toe, have a friend try to pull it out, and see if you can press down hard enough to keep it in place. Strength on the right may not match the left, McDowell says\u2014old ankle sprains, fractures, or numbness can all leave their fingerprint there. The good news is that both deficits respond quickly to practice, like doing toe yoga at your desk during the work day. \u201cIt\u2019s so encouraging because even practicing for a week, people start to notice a difference,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Always walking the same route at the same speed on flat ground\u00a0<\/p>\n
That loop you do around your neighborhood is lovely\u2014same neighbor on the front-porch, same patch of sunlight on the pavement, same goldendoodle at the same corner. Yet getting too comfortable with any one route can be a problem. \u201cWalking is a category of a bunch of moves,\u201d Bowman says, and always trotting down flat sidewalks at one speed misses most of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two at-home tests can tell you a lot. The first is what McDowell calls toe yoga: Sit barefoot…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[777,984,499,103,61,60],"class_list":["post-434380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fitness","tag-evergreen","tag-exercise-fitness","tag-fitness","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}