Foot Pain Expectations Vs Reality

 

Fun Facts About Foot Pain

A prevention is better than cure.

Any signs of plantar fasciitis need to ideally be addressed as soon as possible, as it can become a rather persistent injury leg paining.

My first bit of advice is to go and speak to a professional and get a treatment plan to follow.

However, today I’m going to be covering the more common treatments that have been proven to work for this injury.

Massage Tool

• You want to find a small 500 mil water bottles.
• Pop it in the freezer and then you can use it as a massage tool.

Method

• Role your arch of your foot over the top of the bottle.
• This will work as a massage.
• But also help with the inflammation as it’s ice.

Reps

• Around 10 minutes a day.
• Do these three or four times a day.

 

Tight Achilles and calves can lead to irritation of the plantar fascia.

You need to make sure that you stretch the back of your calf.

That should be something you include in your everyday training program and it’s a good idea to work out what stretch is best for you.

Stretch

• Stand facing a wall with your feet sort of a stride width apart.
• Your back leg behind you.
• Push your weight down through your heel until you start to feel the stretch in the back of your calf.

Reps

• Repeat it on the other leg,
• then go back to the first leg and repeat it with a bent knee and you’ll feel the stretch move further down your calf.

Finding a step.

• Something to hold on to as well.
• You don’t have all of your weight going through the balls and your toes.
• Stand on the balls of your feet on the edge of the step and gently lower your weight into your heels.
• Feel that stretch again at the back of your calf.
• Repeat it with a bent knee.

You can take some of the pressure off the area by making sure that you’ve got an everyday shoe and a running shoe that has a heel higher than the toe.

I don’t mean high heels in this case, but it’s probably best to avoid barefoot shoes that have a completely flat surface and then when it comes to your everyday shoe, especially if have you have a job that means you spend a lot of time on your feet, look for something that’s supportive that’s just going to take that pressure off a bit more.

Massaging

Gentle massage along the length of the fascia will increase blood flow as well as improve the malleability of the area.

You can do this either sitting down with your fingers and your thumbs and just massage it yourself.

Or use a golf ball and gently roll your foot around on top of it.

Some therapists prescribe socks to wear at nightlight’s a calf length sock that has a strap from the toes to the front of the calf, painful thighs.

It acts to gently pull the toes in its direction, putting on a constant stretch on your plantar fascia painful calf muscles overnight, and this will then relieve the soreness of those first few steps in the morning.

Some therapists opt to use a cortisone injection, but there have been cases where that’s actually caused some of the heel pad to dissolve and can obviously lead to other problems.

There’s Botox, which can help relax the muscles and structures around the fascia.

Shockwave therapy is also a favourite with some others, but obviously all of these need to be delivered by a medical expert and only after the less intrusive options have been fully exhausted, cramp in leg, muscles spasms, foot is painful to walk on and as we know, the fascia has a pretty non-existent blood supply and therefore is notorious for its slow healing.

Patience really is key, but optimally prevention is better than cure.

Before increasing your running mileage, you need to make sure that your foot and lower leg are prepared for the extra loading.

Prevention is basically addressing the causes before they happen, and one of the most common causes of plantar fasciitis is increasing your running mileage too quickly.

To prevent , painful bottom of foot, foot paining, foot pain top of foot  you basically need to increase it gradually, and a good guide for this is the 10% rule.

Don’t increase your mileage by more than 10% each week.

Strengthening your foot and calf muscles will help make you ready to absorb the impact and the stresses when you do start to increase your running.

For that, simply you need to find a step, standing on the edge of that and you’re going to do heel raises.

Start off with both heels together.

In that way you’re taking less of the load.

Lower your heel down and then raise upon to your tip toes and back down again.

When you’ve done this for a week or so, you can progress to single leg calf raises

Those assisted.

Holding on to something.

• Then once you’ve got more strength and balance.
• You can actually progress to unassisted single leg calf raises.
• This will proprioception.
• Also really turning on those intrinsic muscles around your foot.
• Along the same lines but with more focus on your foot.

you can work to turn on those intrinsic muscles which help control and make a nice smooth movement from the heel strike.

Right the way through to toe-off.

You can start by just doing some exercises sat at your desk with extending your toes and then crunching your toes back up and you can do that throughout the day.

A slightly more specific exercise you can do later on with a towel or some fabric on the ground.

Use your toes to scrunch that fabric towards your heels.

Even before you have any symptoms, it’s a good idea to do some self-massaging your foot and also the medial border down the inside of your calf as some of the muscles that actually attach on this part will then run and come into tendons that go underneath your foot and amalgamate with that plantar fascia.

By just loosening that it will help make the tendon sheaths and the fascia be able to move more effectively.

We’ve already included the calf stretches in the cure section but hopefully if you put them into your daily routine, heel pain walking, outside of foot pain, pain in the big toe they can become part of prehab and stay there, but there is one other stretch which you can add to make it a little more specific to the actual underside of your foot.

Stretch 2

• Come up to the wall but this time.
• put your toes so they extend now actually touching the wall and your foot is flat on the floor.
• Gradually bend your knee towards the wall.
• You can feel the stretch in your calf but also underneath the bottom of your foot.
• The main take home is look after your body and train smart.

If you use the 10% rule and make sure you listen to any niggles, you should hopefully be able to avoid the onset of plantar fasciitis.

Plantar fasciitis.

A lot of times you have that pain on that plantar fascia, but sometimes you can have it just out your heel, in the back, way up top.

It doesn’t always have to be at your arch.

plantar fasciitis can be caused by a lot of different things, it can even be caused by your knees and your hips, so it really important to kind of find out what’s going on especially if you’re entreating the plantar fasciitis and it’s not getting better.

Get the joints moving in the foot.

we have so many bones and joints in our foot, all along here and all along here, so to get those joints moving you can just really simply start off like kind of curling your toes down.

First Treatment

Fanning  them up.

• Rolling them to the side back and forth.
• Just mobilizing them.

Bending in like this if those joints are tight or maybe have some adhesions or scar tissue in there, that’s going to increase that plantar fasciitis because your foot’s not going to be moving how it’s supposed to.

You can just spend 1 or 2 minutes on this.

• You don’t have to do a lot.
• You can again fan out those toes push down on them curl them in push that way.
• Fan forward
• Fan back
• Just really get all of those joints around the foot even the heel in the back.
• Go back and forth just to get those moving.
• And a lot of times, that will just help loosen it up and that will feel really good as well.

Rolling

• Using a ball to kind of roll stuff out.
• You can use a tennis ball.
• You can use a racquet ball.
• You can really use anything.
• You can use a foam roller if you want to.

I like using a lacrosse ball because it’s a little bit firmer and it gives you a little more pressure, but if you have plantar fasciitis and it’s really tender and painful, you might just want to start off with something like a racquetball or a tennis ball that’s a little squishier.

Second Treatment

 I like to stretch the big toe or we call it the first Ray because if you have a lot of stiffness in that big toe, pain on ball of foot, pain in arch of foot, heels pain and you don’t get that toe extension when you’re walking you don’t get that normal gait pattern, so this is tight that can cause plantar fasciitis as well.

 Sometimes we forget that first ray or that big toe, but it’s really important to stretch and I like the ball because you can just focus on that big toe there.

 You can use it like a traditional stretch hold it for 30 seconds, take a break, do that three times. or you can do some shorter ones if it’s really tight and painful and do like a 15 to 20second, and do maybe five of them.

• Then still with the ball after you get that that big toe.
• Start rolling it down into the ball of your foot.
• The  tarsal muscles are around in here metatarsals and all that kind of stuff.
• You really want to get each and every part.
• That ball of the foot down into the arch on the inside on the outside.
• But make sure you go all the way down to the heel because that’s where that plantar fascia attaches.
•  A lot of times people have that heel pain.

 I always say even go past it a little bit but really get that whole area. you can go up and down a couple times or you can just spend, you know, all your time in one spot, move down, all your time in the next spot.

• Do it again one to two minutes.
• Three if you want a little bit more.
  
  
  
• You can do it standing,
• That’s going to give you a little more pressure to push through the ball.
• You feel really good stretch with this.
• If you’re tender and in that plantar fascia.
• Bottom of the foot.
• You might want to start doing it sitting down in a chair.
•  Then you don’t have to put as much pressure on it.
• Still even standing, you can do a little bit of pressure versus a lot of pressure.
• It’s really up to you.
• You want it to be that hurt so good feeling.
• you don’t want it to just be painful the whole time.
•  Make sure you’re getting that whole bottom of the foot there.

 The Third Treatment

•  Using some sort of compression sock
•  It is open at the toes.
• That gives you a couple different benefits.
• One of it is just to kind of keep the flow and your toes,
•  It’s not so close up because you could put socks over this.
• It prevents any kind of fungal infections and things like Tahiti’s got some nice compression here and here so it doesn’t slide which I like that as well.
• At the heel there’s some reinforcement.
• Then there’s also some extra support at that arch.
• A lot of times with plantar fasciitis.

That arch starts to fall a little bit and this just kind of helps support it so it doesn’t have so much pressure on it.

They’re pretty versatile, like I said, again since they’re not these big huge things, you can put your regular socks over them which is really nice if you want to, or you can just wear them as is.

Again super comfortable, and you can see that extra support there and that extra support there as well.

 The fourth treatment

• Getting almost like a pre gait movement.
• A lot of times with plantar fasciitis, what happens even if it’s something coming at our hips or knees, we end up not getting a normal gait pattern or a normal walking pattern.
• A lot folks really doing an exaggerated step.
• Hitting your heel first and really coming through on your toes like this.
• You can do that in slow motion, and you can really just staying one spot.
• You don’t necessarily have to do the heel strike to start off with.
• I like to do the full going through, but you can really start in the position and just roll up onto your toes.
• Again it’s really working that first ray, that big toe, as well.
• You want to keep your foot forward.

If you’re going out and getting pressured indifferent spots on the outside, then you’re not really getting that full stretch.

• A lot of times people end up rolling out on the outside of their foot.
  
  
  
• They’re not getting that good proper follow-through.
• Just standing and doing.
• You can even use your arms little bit to give you an extra push forward.
• But really getting that exaggerated.
• Curling your toes and going up on your toe’s movement.
• Then if you want to add in.
• You know kind of a heel. start here and push through.
• You can and do that you know five to ten times.

If that feels pretty good then you can kind of bump up from there until you get to about fifteen or twenty and then you can actually do the distance walking and really just exaggerate that heel to toe strike just to loosen everything up.

The Last Treatment

Going to actually bae plantar fascia massage.

To stretch out the plantar fascia, you really want to get the whole bottom of the foot just like when you were rolling with the ball.

You can stretch it out a couple of different ways, but what I like to do is really just use my thumbs to get down.

You can use a lotion or a cream if you want to so there’s not as much friction.

But you don’t have to use the lotion or cream if you don’t want to.

Start off just by taking your thumbs and pushing right down the middle of that fascia and just get all the way to the end past the ball of the foot.

 Then go out

Just doing that a couple times.

If you have some inflammation, you might feel those adhesions or scar tissue in there, and where you feel that a little more it will probably be more sensitive, and that just means you really need to work on that spot a little bit more.

After you do this for about 30 seconds maybe a minute, then you’re going to start fanning outwards.  take the thumbs and then just go outwards, just fanning out and then once you get closer to where the those joints are in the foot, I like then pull a little bit too.

 Just spreading out everything and then stretching out those joints a little bit as well.

 Just moving through, going through the top just getting that stretch starting all the way down at the heel, fan out there, keep on going and you really want to do this for about three to five minutes.

But a lot of times it’s pretty uncomfortable, but that’s really going to get a good stretch.

You can even stretch out the toes if you want to.

You can take each joint and just kind of do some joint mobilizations at the end as well, but taking each one and going up and down just to get a lot of movement in there and flexibility in there as well.

You can do that while you’re massaging.

I like to do that as well again just kind of taking each joint of the toes and then getting that movement from side to side.

That does a really nice job too and usually gets it feeling a lot better.

One more time fanning out and then just going straight down that way.

 Conclusion

 Most common toe injured is you can injure any of them you most commonly injure it because you stub it on something. It is actually pretty easy to fracture these toes.

The problem is most people who stub their toes end up going to an emergency room or an urgent care centre or sometimes to primary care doctor’s office and they are told to simply tape their toes together and that is called buddy taping.

What you do is you take a piece of tape and you essentially tape the toes together.

The problem here is that does absolutely nothing to stop the toes from moving so now you have a fracture but it continues to move and so weeks and months later

That means is whenever you break a bone, big or small, you have to stop the motion at the joints on either side of that bone.

A lot of people think I am little crazy when I say this because it just looks so big to treat this little broken toe but the problem is that not only do you have the motion here but you’ve got tendons that is start in your leg and go down in your toe and those cause motion of the toe, so a taller walking boot is the only way that you can actually stop the motion of those tendons and stop the motion of the foot.

Because the boot has a rocker on it, it prevents you from moving it.

First of all, if you do stub your toe, I highly recommend you try not to treat this yourself, go see a doctor, get an x-ray but then make sure you get a walking boot.

If you have no ability to see a doctor, you can actually find recommendations on the types of walking boots you can use there but otherwise, again, get an x-ray and see someone about it budget into a walking boot.

Do not let them tape your toes together to try and treat a broken toe.