Picture a yoga room settling into a long hold. Students are sitting back on their heels, a block tucked under the hips or the shins, and somewhere in the room a quiet wince. The pose is supposed to open the breath. For many people, though, the sensation lives in the big toe joint, where the top of the foot is pressed toward the mat and the toes refuse to bend that far. In her January 2024 video for Better Yoga, teacher Kari Harendorf calls this an overlooked part of the body with an outsized job, and she spends just under seven minutes making the case that the big toe, and the mobility it needs, deserves a place in every daily routine.
The argument is simple and, once you hear it, hard to dismiss. The toe is small. Its consequences are not.
Harendorf opens with a list of jobs. "The big toe is so important in shock absorption, in balance, in a proper gait," she says in the video (0:14). Then she adds the one that gives the piece its forward momentum: "It is the big toe that is involved in propulsion, which is moving you forward in life" (0:27). The line is a metaphor, but she is anchoring it in the body. The moment you push off the ground to take a step, the big toe is one of the structures doing the pushing.
That framing changes how you read a sticky toe. If the joint cannot move through its range, the work does not disappear. It gets handed to the rest of the chain. Harendorf makes that explicit: if you don't have the ability to move the big toe joint, "you're going to lose the arch," and you become more likely to injure yourself "somewhere up the chain" (2:45). The arch, the ankle, the knee and the hip all inherit a problem that started at the front of the foot. It is a useful reminder that a body is a system, and that a small restriction at one end can show up as ache or instability at the other.
Much of the video is anchored to one target. In the foot-focused sitting pose she describes, the goal is a 90-degree angle at the toes. Her test is concrete. She places a block on the mat and asks whether the heel and the ball of the foot can both rest on it. "If you don't have the ability to extend the toes that much range of motion, your heel will be forward," she says (1:21). When that happens, the weight lands in the toe joints, and the position becomes, in her word, excruciating for many people.
This is the detail that makes the piece useful rather than merely motivational. She is not asking students to force the pose. She is saying the pose is a diagnostic. If the heel floats forward of the ball of the foot, the toes are telling you where the range has gone. The answer is not to push harder through the discomfort. It is to restore the motion first, in smaller and more accessible ways, until the angle becomes available on its own.
Harendorf is emphatic that the work does not require a mat, a class or a free hour. Her first suggestion is to do it while you are already sitting. "You can work on the mobility of your big toe while watching television," she says (1:53), adding the places people already spend their time: the couch, a chair, a desk.
The technique she teaches is manual, and it is specific. You wrap a hand around your toes and pull them back. The most important instruction in the entire video is where the movement should come from. "You don't want to get the movement from the ankle," she warns. "You want to specifically focus on the toes" (2:10). Hold the stretch, and let the ankle stay quiet so the change is happening in the joints you are actually trying to train.
"Pull the toes back now, do the opposite: flex the toes." (paraphrased from Kari Harendorf's Better Yoga video, 2:22)
Then comes the opposite direction. Flexing the toes gives you a larger range you can work with by hand. She also points to something quieter: if you have lost range, the brain can rebuild it. "Flexing and extending the toes, you'll be able to do just by using your brain," she says, and that practice "will build the neural pathways" that increase range of motion manually, after which you can "find it on your own" (3:03). It is a notable claim for a short video, and it shapes the whole approach. The hand gets you started. The repetition is what teaches the system to do the work itself.
The most precise instruction in the video concerns location. Harendorf says to take the big toe alone, pull it forward to create joint space, then pull back into extension and down. The key is where your hands land. "Don't get the middle joint. You want to work right at the base of that first joint," she says (3:42). That is the kind of cue that separates a productive session from a session that just irritates the knuckles of the toe. She describes the feeling as pleasant over time, calling it "giving yourself a little self-care, self-love."
She also offers a detail for the foot's arch and its lift. In many yoga classes teachers cue students to "lift and spread your toes." Harendorf explains why that instruction matters. It activates the arch, and an arch that is not supported by toe mobility is the one that tends to collapse. This is the reason the toe drills feed directly into standing postures, lunges and balance work, not only seated ones.
Near the middle of the video Harendorf describes weaving a finger between the big toe and the second toe and pulling inward. She presents this as "reversing a bunion that is starting," and she links it to the alignment problem she sees with runners and walkers. "If you're running or walking and your big toe is deviated from its original place, it puts a lot of pressure up the joints in the body" (4:04). Her advice is to do both sides and to treat it as one of the most direct steps available. Because she is describing a technique for an early stage of change, and not offering a cure, it's worth reading her claim as a teacher's description of what she has seen and taught, not as a medical promise. If you have an existing bunion or pain, a clinician who can look at the foot is the right next call.
Harendorf's second group of drills is about weight. When you are sitting with your foot on the floor, lift the heel. "You're literally coming into a relevé position in ballet," she says, describing the same mechanics a dancer uses to rise onto the balls of the feet (4:41). The principle is that weight moving forward through the foot forces the toes to work through a larger range. "The more weight you put down through the foot," she says, "the quicker your body will adapt and change" (4:57).
For students who lack knee flexion or find the floor version uncomfortable, she offers a wall. "Anytime you pass a wall you could take a break," she says (5:02). Bring the toes up the wall, then bend the knee forward and drive the ball of the foot into the floor. She calls this one of the best things to do before a yoga practice, a run or a lifting session, because it wakes up the muscles of the foot. Standing, she suggests lifting the heel to push the weight toward the ball of the foot, which makes the foot work harder and asks the toes for more movement.
The video ends where it started, with the whole body. She talks about the way this small range of motion reaches up the leg, through the pelvis and into the lower back, and "even beyond." The benefits she names are balance, gait, and the kind of stability that matters with age. She ties it directly to falling, which she describes as "such a problem which sends a lot of people to the hospital," including with fractures (5:52). It is the most sobering line in a video otherwise full of gentle, domestic instruction, and it reframes the whole piece. A few minutes at the TV, a wall, a standing heel lift: none of it is glamorous, and all of it is practical.
If you want to take the video's lessons into your week, start small and specific. Choose one sitting moment a day, hold the toe stretch with the ankle quiet, and move the big toe from the base of its first joint. Add the wall drill before a walk or run. Keep the heel-lift and weight-forward cues for standing work, and notice whether your heel starts to drift forward in the block test. Harendorf's own message is that the foot does not need a grand plan. It needs repetition, attention and a little patience. For the full sequence and her classes, you can visit her platform, Better Yoga, through the link in her video description.
