Should We All Be Able To Touch Our Toes?

If you’re of a certain age, you may remember the Presidential Fitness Test, a now-defunct physical fitness capability test in schools across the country. It was made up of multiple exercise challenges, and one of the factors it assessed was flexibility via a sit-and-reach test.

Flexibility has been a long-standing measure of physical health. Touching your toes is another marker. And for some people, touching your toes without bending your legs is simple. For others, though, it’s impossible. Does this matter? And does it say anything about your actual health?

Simply put: Should we all be able to touch our toes without bending our legs? Here’s what physical therapists say.

Being able to touch your toes is related to more than just flexibility.

“I’d say there’s a lot of factors that go into touching your toes, and it’s not just flexibility or hamstring length,” said Amanda Sachdeva, a physical therapist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York.

“It is also flexibility of your calf muscles and your lower back muscles ― these are also involved when trying to touch your toes,” Theresa Marko, a physical therapist at Marko Physical Therapy in New York and spokesperson for the American Physical Therapy Association, told HuffPost via email.

Beyond this, being able to touch your toes also has to do with your joint mobility and strength, Sachdeva said. “If your joint mobility is restricted … that can also affect how much you’re able to move. If you’re not able to stabilize the muscles by total contraction of different muscle groups, then that might affect how able you are to move.”

Your ability to touch your toes combines these three things, which also play a role in overall movement abilities. “There’s an inherent