Stirrup Strapping

Today what I’m going to talk to you about is a stirrup strap. It’s a really handy little strap that’s used to help stabilize digits and toes.

Basically what we’re doing with it as we’re wrapping it around the top, bringing that around to the plantar surface underneath the foot and crossing them over like that. It’s used to help stabilize the toes as far as keeping them straight in that direction. But also, if they start to get a bit wobbly and a bit crossed over like that as they can with plantar plate issues, you can use and you can adjust the angles of the stirrups, to try to help straighten them and keep the toes straighter.

It’s one of these sorts of strappings that can be very effective and it might be the sort of strapping that you would use for some type of turf toe type injury as well, although they generally have their own dedicated type of strapping.

So we’re going to look at now how we put the stirrup strapping on and it can be used in conjunction with some foam stripping, or just on its own.

A simple stirrup strapping, really useful type of strapping to help change the alignment of the toes, help to reduce some of the pressure on the plantar plate that runs up in through here and helps to straighten out retracted or curly toes.

So we have the foot in a neutral sort of position, I use Mefix, there’s a number of different tapes that you can use but the ideal sort of tape has some degree of flex in it, it’s not totally rigid. You can adjust the amount of pressure that you apply on the taping by how much you pull it down. When you’re putting it over the top here, you make sure that it is over the proximal and the distal joints so that it’s not bending the toe over. You curl it round like that and then you apply a little bit of pressure, pulling it down and crossing it over like so. What you can imagine is that then it becomes very hard for that toe to want to pull back up like so.

Alright, it’s best applied early in the morning when the feet are nice and dry, because that’s when it will stick the best. Start off slowly with changing the angles and the position because it might be a little bit uncomfortable and put a little bit much pressure on the top here if you try to pull it down too far, but you can see that that stops the toe from pulling up that way.

So that’s a stirrup strapping for a digital type deformity or a plantar plate injury.