The short foot exercise strengthens the small muscles on the sole of your foot by training you to lift your arch without curling your toes. You sit with your foot flat on the ground, then draw the ball of your foot toward your heel as if trying to make your foot shorter and your arch taller. It sounds simple, but the movement is surprisingly tricky to learn, and the research behind it is more robust than you might expect for something that requires no equipment at all.
What Actually Happens Inside Your Foot
Your foot has two families of muscles. The extrinsic muscles originate in your lower leg and send long tendons into the foot; they handle the heavy lifting during walking, running, and jumping. The intrinsic muscles live entirely within the foot itself, nestled beneath your arch. These smaller muscles stabilize the arch from underneath and fine-tune how your foot interacts with the ground during every step. When researchers used MRI to measure muscle activation during the short foot exercise, they found that activation of these intrinsic muscles increased by roughly 17% to 35%, depending on which specific muscle was measured.1Europe PMC. Intrinsic Foot Muscle Activation During Specific Exercises: A T2 Time Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study That range is comparable to a “toes spread out” exercise but higher than simpler toe extension drills, which makes the short foot exercise one of the more efficient ways to hit the entire group of intrinsic muscles at once.
A key distinction separates the short foot exercise from many popular foot exercises. When you curl a towel with your toes, for instance, you rely heavily on your long toe flexors, which are extrinsic muscles running from the calf. Ultrasound measurements of muscle stiffness have confirmed this difference: the flexor digitorum longus, a major extrinsic toe-curling muscle, activates substantially more during metatarsophalangeal flexion exercises (toe curls) than during the short foot exercise.2Journal of Back and Musculoskeletal Rehabilitation. Comparison by ultrasound shear wave elastography of toe flexor muscle contraction during MTP flexion exercise and short-foot exercise Meanwhile, the intrinsic muscles like the abductor hallucis and flexor hallucis brevis activate during both exercises. The practical takeaway is that the short foot exercise zeroes in on the muscles you actually want to strengthen for arch support, while toe curls recruit a broader cast that includes muscles you probably don’t need to target.
How to Perform the Exercise
Start seated in a firm chair with your feet flat on the floor, knees bent at roughly 90 degrees, and your foot in a neutral position. Shoes off. Here is the movement:
- Set your toes: Press them lightly into the floor without gripping or curling. They should stay long and relaxed, making full contact with the ground throughout the exercise.
- Shorten the foot: Without curling your toes, try to draw the ball of your foot back toward your heel. Imagine pulling the base of your big toe closer to your heel along the inside of your foot. Your arch should visibly rise.
- Hold and release: Maintain the contraction for five to ten seconds, then relax fully. Repeat.
The sensation is subtle. You should feel a tightening or doming under the arch, not a cramping in your toes or calf. If your toes are clawing or your foot is rolling outward, you’re compensating with the wrong muscles. Many people find it helpful to place a finger under the arch at first, so they can feel whether the arch is lifting, or to watch their foot in a mirror.
A common prescription in the research literature is roughly 100 repetitions per day, typically broken into sets of 10 to 20.3PubMed. Differences in static- and dynamic-balance task performance after 4 weeks of intrinsic-foot-muscle training: the short-foot exercise versus the towel-curl exercise Most studies that showed meaningful results ran their interventions for four to six weeks, though some went longer. You don’t need to do all 100 reps in one sitting. Splitting them across your day, perhaps a set while you’re at your desk and another while watching TV, is perfectly fine and arguably easier to sustain.
Progressing Beyond the Seated Version
Sitting is the beginner stage. Once you can reliably activate your arch without toe curling, the next step is to perform the exercise while standing on both feet, then on one foot. Standing versions demand more from the intrinsic muscles because they have to stabilize your arch under your full body weight. A pilot study that used a progressive eccentric version of the short foot exercise over five weeks found that participants significantly improved their postural control, with large effect sizes for base of support and time-to-boundary measures.4Exercise Science. The Effect of a Short Foot Eccentric Endurance Exercise on Foot Center of Pressure: A Pilot study Eccentric here means you slowly lower your arch under control rather than just doming it up, which adds a strength-building challenge.
From single-leg standing, you can integrate the short foot contraction into functional movements: hold the arch dome while doing a single-leg squat, a step-up, or a heel raise. The goal is to train the intrinsic muscles to fire automatically during real movement, not just during a conscious drill. Runners, for instance, showed improved movement quality scores and hip flexibility after six weeks of short foot exercises incorporated into their routine.5MDPI (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health). Impact of Short Foot Muscle Exercises on Quality of Movement and Flexibility in Amateur Runners That suggests the benefits extend beyond the foot once the exercise becomes part of how you move.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
The number one error is toe curling. It’s instinctive: your brain knows how to flex your toes, so when you ask it to “shorten the foot,” it defaults to what it already knows. If your toes are white-knuckling the floor or bunching up, you’re using your extrinsic toe flexors instead of the intrinsic arch muscles. Try lifting your toes slightly off the ground first to “find” the arch contraction, then gently set them back down while maintaining the dome.
Another common compensation is rolling the foot outward onto its outer edge (supinating). This creates the visual appearance of a higher arch without actually contracting the right muscles. Your weight should stay distributed across the heel, the base of the big toe, and the base of the little toe throughout the exercise. If the inside of your big toe lifts off the floor, you’re supinating.
Some people also recruit their tibialis anterior, the muscle on the front of the shin, by pulling the foot upward rather than shortening it along the ground. If you notice your ankle dorsiflexing or your shin muscles firing, refocus on the sole of the foot. The movement is entirely within the foot itself; nothing above the ankle should change.
What It Does for Flat Feet
This is where the evidence is strongest. A meta-analysis pooling results from multiple studies found that short foot exercises significantly reduced navicular drop, a clinical measure of how much the arch collapses when you stand on it, compared to control groups.6PubMed Central. Effects of the Short-Foot Exercise on Foot Alignment and Muscle Hypertrophy in Flatfoot Individuals: A Meta-Analysis The same analysis showed improvements in the Foot Posture Index, a composite clinical score that rates how pronated or supinated a foot sits. In plain terms, people with flat feet who did the exercise consistently ended up with measurably higher arches and less inward collapse.
A separate trial comparing short foot exercises to arch support insoles in people with flexible flatfoot found that the exercise group showed significant decreases in navicular drop while the insole-only group did not.7Journal of Physical Therapy Science. The effects of short foot exercises and arch support insoles on improvement in the medial longitudinal arch and dynamic balance of flexible flatfoot patients That doesn’t mean insoles are useless, but it suggests the exercise produces structural changes that passive support alone doesn’t. Both groups improved their dynamic balance, so the two approaches work through different mechanisms and may complement each other.
Pain is another outcome that matters. In a trial of patients with acquired flat feet, those who performed short foot exercises saw their pain scores drop from about 7 out of 10 to about 4 out of 10, a large and clinically meaningful change.8Journal of Health, Wellness and Community Research. Effect of Short Foot Exercises on Pain and Foot Posture in Patients with Acquired Pes Planus The likely mechanism is straightforward: stronger intrinsic muscles support the arch more actively, which takes strain off the plantar fascia and other passive structures that hurt when they’re overloaded.
Balance and Proprioception Benefits
The intrinsic foot muscles don’t just hold up your arch. They’re embedded with sensory receptors that feed your brain information about where your foot is in space, how much pressure is under each part of the sole, and how fast the ground beneath you is shifting. When these muscles get stronger and more active, your proprioception, your body’s sense of its own position, improves along with them.
In people with excessively pronated feet, a single session of short foot exercises immediately improved dynamic balance, increasing their limits of stability in every direction tested.9PubMed Central. Immediate Effect of Short-foot Exercise on Dynamic Balance of Subjects with Excessively Pronated Feet That immediate effect is interesting because it points to a neural mechanism: your brain gets better sensory input from the foot and responds with better balance, even before any muscle has actually grown.
A randomized controlled trial in people with chronic ankle instability tested short foot exercises against a standard balance training program. The short foot exercise group improved their vibration sensory threshold, a measure of how precisely the foot detects subtle ground vibrations, by about 42%, compared to 23% in the balance training group.10PubMed Central. Short-Foot Exercise Promotes Quantitative Somatosensory Function in Ankle Instability: A Randomized Controlled Trial Better vibration sense translates to faster, more accurate balance corrections in everyday life, which matters for anyone who rolls an ankle easily or feels unsteady on uneven terrain.
Short Foot Exercise Versus Towel Curls
Towel curls are the most commonly prescribed foot exercise in clinical practice, probably because they’re easier to teach and easier to verify that someone is doing them. You place a towel on the floor and scrunch it toward you with your toes. The problem is that towel curls primarily work the long toe flexors rather than the intrinsic arch muscles.
A four-week head-to-head comparison assigned one group to 100 daily repetitions of the short foot exercise and another group to 100 daily repetitions of towel curls. Neither group showed changes in static balance or navicular height. However, in dynamic balance testing, the short foot exercise group reduced their side-to-side center-of-pressure sway significantly more than the towel curl group on the nondominant leg.3PubMed. Differences in static- and dynamic-balance task performance after 4 weeks of intrinsic-foot-muscle training: the short-foot exercise versus the towel-curl exercise The results weren’t dramatic, and they were uneven between legs, but they support the idea that the short foot exercise does something that towel curls don’t, likely because it more selectively targets the stabilizing muscles under the arch.
This doesn’t mean you should throw out towel curls entirely. They’re still a reasonable warm-up or a way to build general toe strength. But if your goal is arch support and balance, the short foot exercise appears to be the more targeted tool.
Effects Up the Kinetic Chain
Your foot is the foundation of the entire lower limb, and what happens at the arch influences the knee above it. When the arch collapses inward, the shin follows, pulling the knee into a valgus position (inward collapse). This dynamic knee valgus is one of the best-known risk factors for ACL injuries, especially in women.
A recent trial in women with dynamic knee valgus found that eight weeks of short foot exercises reduced their valgus angle by an average of 4 degrees, improved their navicular drop by about 4 millimeters, and increased their ankle dorsiflexion range of motion by nearly 7 degrees.11PubMed Central. Short Foot Exercises as a Preventive Strategy for ACL Injury in Women with Dynamic Knee Valgus Knee and ankle proprioception errors also decreased. Those effect sizes were large, and they suggest that a simple foot exercise can meaningfully change how the knee tracks during movement. The researchers proposed the exercise as a preventive strategy for ACL injuries, which is a bold claim for something that doesn’t directly train the knee at all, but the biomechanical logic is sound: fix the foundation, and the structure above it aligns better.
Combining the Exercise with Orthotics
A question that comes up often is whether you should do the short foot exercise instead of wearing arch supports, or alongside them. The evidence favors doing both. A randomized controlled trial in people with symptomatic flexible flatfoot found that six weeks of short foot exercises combined with shoe insoles improved pain, function, and foot pressure distribution more than insoles alone.12PubMed Central. The combined effect of short foot exercises and orthosis in symptomatic flexible flatfoot: a randomized controlled trial
Another trial showed that the combination of foot orthoses and short foot exercises increased the cross-sectional area of the abductor hallucis muscle, one of the key arch-supporting intrinsic muscles, more than orthoses alone.13PubMed. Effect of foot orthoses and short-foot exercise on the cross-sectional area of the abductor hallucis muscle in subjects with pes planus: a randomized controlled trial The combination group also gained more big-toe flexion strength. Think of it this way: the insole passively supports your arch while the exercise actively builds the muscles that eventually provide that support on their own. Over time, you may need less external support, but starting with both gives the best short-term results.
Older Adults and Fall Prevention
Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death in people over 65, and foot strength and balance are central to fall risk. The short foot exercise is particularly appealing for older adults because it requires no equipment, can be done seated, and carries essentially zero injury risk. Research in elderly community-dwelling individuals has found that the exercise can reduce fall risk by strengthening intrinsic foot muscles and improving foot proprioception.14Journal of Yoga & Physical Therapy. Effect of Short Foot Exercise for Fall Prevention in Elderly Community Dwelling Individuals an Experimental Study
The balance improvements seen in younger populations with pronated feet appear to carry over to older adults as well. If you’re helping an older parent or grandparent with their balance, the seated version of the short foot exercise is a low-stakes starting point that addresses one of the most overlooked contributors to instability: the foot itself.
The Footwear Connection
Modern shoes, particularly those with thick cushioning, rigid arch supports, and elevated heels, do some of the work that your intrinsic foot muscles would otherwise handle. Researchers comparing people who habitually wear minimal footwear to those who wear conventional shoes have found that conventional footwear is associated with weaker, less stiff feet, and have hypothesized that shoes reduce the role of foot muscles in maintaining arch stiffness, leading to possible disuse atrophy.15PubMed Central. Foot strength and stiffness are related to footwear use in a comparison of minimally- vs. conventionally-shod populations
A six-month study of people who transitioned to minimal footwear found that daily activity in minimal shoes increased foot strength, and that people who had been wearing minimal shoes for longer had higher arch height than those who were newer to them.16PubMed Central. Daily activity in minimal footwear increases foot strength The connection to the short foot exercise is direct: both approaches work the same intrinsic muscles, just through different means. If you’re interested in foot health but not ready to overhaul your shoe collection, the short foot exercise gives you a targeted way to train those muscles without changing anything else about your day. If you are drawn to minimal footwear, the short foot exercise is a sensible bridge exercise to build foot strength before making the transition, which should be gradual to avoid overloading tissues that aren’t ready.
Who Should Be Cautious
The short foot exercise is remarkably safe for most people, but a few situations warrant caution. If you have a rigid flatfoot, meaning the arch doesn’t appear even when you’re sitting or standing on your toes, the exercise may not produce the same results as it does for flexible flatfoot. Rigid flatfoot often involves structural bone changes that strengthening alone can’t address, and you should get assessed before assuming the exercise will fix things.
People with acute plantar fasciitis or a foot stress fracture should let the acute inflammation settle before adding the exercise. It’s an active muscle contraction, and loading an inflamed or fractured structure, even gently, can delay healing. Once the acute phase passes, short foot exercises can be part of a rehabilitation plan, but timing matters.
If you have significant peripheral neuropathy, particularly from diabetes, you may struggle to feel the contraction at all. That doesn’t mean the exercise is harmful, but it may be frustratingly difficult to learn without adequate sensory feedback. Working with a physical therapist who can use ultrasound imaging to provide visual feedback on muscle contraction can help in these cases. Ultrasound has been validated as a highly accurate way to measure intrinsic foot muscle size, with measurements correlating closely with MRI.17BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders. Validity of ultrasound imaging for intrinsic foot muscle cross-sectional area measurements demonstrated by strong agreement with MRI Some therapists use real-time ultrasound to show patients whether the right muscles are firing during the exercise, which is especially useful during the learning phase.