How to Treat Turf Toe

Video Transcript

RUSS PAINE: Today, we're going to be talking about turf toe, which is a very painful injury. It actually can end your career if you're a professional athlete or any kind of athlete for that matter. Basically, what it involves is disrupting the capsule underneath the big toe. Again, this occurs when your foot is in this position and maybe you get a downward blow so that your foot is--your toe is what we call dorsiflex are pulled up in this position. You get a blow to the heel and it disrupts the capsule underneath your toe. It can lead to arthritis. Also, it can lead to instability of this segment underneath your toe. The treatment for this is immobilization, some rehabilitation, ultrasound, that type of thing, and then also another thing that's very helpful is to strengthen the toe flexor group underneath. Now, the one thing you don't want to do is we'll show on our model - Ross, go ahead and flip over and we'll look at your toe here - is again the injury occurs when your foot is in this position and you get a blow to the heel causing a forceful maneuver this way, so it disrupts this ligament complex underneath. So the one thing you don't want to do with this injury is to stretch your toe back to this direction. So we're trying to do is increase the strength of the muscles underneath the toe and this can be done by doing a towel curl or picking up marbles with your toes, and then you can also have someone manually resist as you flex your toe all the way down, down like this and back up and down, back up, down, back up. So that can help increase the strength of the toe flexors. The most important thing for turf toe is to have a really good orthotic made for you. And typically what they do is a carbon graphite orthotic that is a little bit stiffer than a normal orthotic, so again when you get into that plantarflex position and your foot is here and you're fixing to sprint then your toe doesn't come up all the way as you push off with the sprinting maneuver. Ice application obviously is also important. So turf toe is a problem but can be treated effectively.