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Know Your Body: Why wiggling your toes is extremely important for blood circulation
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It’s a new week, and we are back with yet another interesting aspect of our body and its functioning. Keen to find out? Well, join us as we decode whether a simple activity like wiggling or twitching your toes can help improve blood circulation in the body. In fact, what we found may actually come as a surprise to you — that any movement, including the simple act of wiggling your toes, is extremely healthy not just for overall health but also blood circulation, in particular! Here’s how.
Dr Subhendu Mohanty, interventional cardiologist, Sharda Hospital, Noida said that wiggling the toes is a form of calf muscle exercise that helps improve blood circulation in the entire body — and this has a link with what we previously told you, that our calf muscles are also known as our “second heart“.
Movement helps ensure blood circulation (Source: Getty Images/Thinkstock)
Like the heart, which receives venous or deoxygenated (impure) blood from the body and then pumps arterial (pure) blood to the whole body for oxygen supply, the calf muscles also play a major role in returning the venous blood from the legs to the heart, explained Dr Mohanty.
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According to a 2016-review, the University of Missouri-Columbia researchers found that fidgeting while sitting can protect the arteries in the legs from getting clogged and potentially help prevent arterial disease as against previous research noting that sitting for an extended period of time at a computer or being on a long flight reduces blood flow to the legs, which may contribute to the development of cardiovascular disease.
Neurologist Sudhir Kumar also mentioned that wiggling of toes or moving toes is a must at regular intervals. “Lack of movement during prolonged sitting causes stasis of blood and results in poor circulation. The risk is higher in people with diabetes, and hypertension, and among smokers. The risk is also high in people needing rest after undergoing surgery or suffering a fracture of leg bones,” he elucidated.
According to Dr Kumar, most jobs these days require sitting for prolonged hours, which results in lack of movement, further predisposing one to poor blood circulation in the feet and legs. “As such, wiggling your toes for a few minutes, after every 30-40 minutes, would improve the blood circulation in feet and legs, and reduce the risk of vascular insufficiency (less blood flow in arteries) as well as deep vein thrombosis (clotting of blood in leg veins),” Dr Kumar told indianexpress.com.
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