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Most people with bunions are told or given the impression that their toes look the way they do because they wear narrow toe box shoes or it's genetic. And while those certainly are factors, if your goal is to fix the visual appearance of your foot or the function of it, it won't happen unless you can do this one thing properly. What's happening with bunions is that over time, the foot is consistently creating a gaping or opening of space at the toes because I can't do it at the proper location where it should be. So this is a compensation of gaping. Typically when we walk, our foot needs to access pronation or lowering of the foot arch as we move through the gate cycle. What should be happening is that with this pronation, there should be a gaping or widening of the space of the segments and joints within the midfoot. If we can't create an opening and widening of this space under normal pronation mechanics, then we're gonna create a compensation because we still need to create some form of yielding and gaping, but we're gonna do it one segment away which typically occurs right here at the big toe. So what happens is that we actually collapse the whole foot down and we overly pronate in an attempt to create a compensation for a lack of that genuine pronation. And now we're also going to push too much off of the inside edge of that big toe and now you have that bunion forming over time. And yes, your genetics can absolutely influence the shape of your foot in which of these compensations you're going to use, but also you could benefit from getting wider toe box shoes. But if your foot can't properly gap at the right places as you move into pronation, then you won't get much long-term relief or much of a long-term fix. So try these two things to get better movement at your midfoot. This first one's a stretch. That's gonna get us better movement through the midfoot. So cross one leg over of the foot that you wanna work. If my right foot's crossed over, I'm gonna take my right hand and grip the underside of the ball my foot like this. I'm gonna take my left hand and place it around the inside portion of my heel and grip it like that. Wrap my fingers around. You're gonna pull your foot closer to your knee and you're going to twist down with this hand and twist up with this hand around the ball of your foot. This is gonna create a stretch sensation through the arch of your foot a little bit and then you're gonna twist down in a way and then you're going to come up reversing that action. And you can play around with this and see how much force and pressure works for you just to get a nice little mild stretch there. Now we're actually gonna work on genuine pronation. So take some folded up paper towels about this long and this thick, maybe even a little bit more thick depending on how high your foot arch is. The higher your foot arch, a little bit more thickness could be nice. Take the paper towels and place them just underneath the first two toes and also the ball your foot underneath those two toes. The rest is off. Now take a slight step back with the passive side that's gonna be my left side in this example. Square up your hips and lock out your knee. Now unlock your knee and keep your foot relaxed but push your knee over your big toe as you turn your pelvis away from that side, keeping your hips level. You're gonna feel your foot arch go down, close into the ground naturally if you do that. Then square up your hips, lock out your knee, unlock your knee and then go forward. Just make sure that again, your foot is relaxed.