Anyone who has had that real burning feeling in their heel or underneath their foot knows all about Plantar Fasciitis. It can be a very annoying and painful chronic injury that can affect daily life and limit you from playing sports and simply just walking around. Most solutions involve stretches and massage with a spikey ball to relieve the pain and maybe some calf raises. While this may be effective at managing the pain, they are merely just treating your symptoms and will not actually deal with why you got this problem in the first place. In this article I will show you some of the simple steps we have proven to work with not just plantar fasciitis, but also with other leg injuries and feet stability problems. It is important to follow the process I have laid out this article and not skip steps in order for the body to be fully prepared for each progression.
Strength Training For Runners Is Critical If You Want To Stay Injury Free
The worst thing that can every happen to a keen distance runner is suffering with a chronic injury like plantar fasciitis, ITB friction syndrome, or patella-femoral knee pain that hangs around for months or even years. The typical approach to use rest, anti-inflammatory medication, a massage or even some therapy may help to calm the injury down but the minute you go back to running all the pain comes rushing back to the way it was. This is something that could easily be prevented if a carefully designed strength training program is used in combination with your running training. Having been a very keen distance runner for a long time myself, I am very aware of all the injuries associated, and experienced first hand some of these annoying and painful injuries in my time. I was able to get on top of these quickly and over time learned that the secret was using strength training techniques to improve gait and working on my running technique. I found the perfect combination of strength training, stability training, postural retraining, movement skills and more efficient running technique that allowed me to reach my peak when I was in my late 30’s. If only I had been told this many years earlier who knows what I would have been able to achieve. I have since used the same methods for assessing hundreds of runners and sporting athletes to overcome some of the most annoying and chronic injuries preventing them from enjoying their running or sport. In this article, I am going to show you these secrets and also what I have found to be the common traits so you can prevent them from stopping you in your tracks.
How The BIG TOE Influences Your Functional Stability
The big toe is a very underestimated joint in providing us with the stability and strength for movement. I would be the first to tell you that I was ignorant to this for a very long time, even considering I know exactly what happens if you injure your big toe as I have broken mine before. It left me on crutches for several weeks and unable to walk or run correctly for months. It was not this however that led me to appreciate foot stability a lot more, it was more to do with my frustration at not being able to help some people with walking difficulty. Back in 2015 I started working with several tricky cases of people who had severe walking impairments from car accidents, disease, and spinal injury. Working closely with these clients several times per week our typical training was helping a lot but not providing the improvement I really wanted. I knew I was missing something and I could see that in every case there was huge problems at the feet, even though none of these people had pain at the feet. I have covered the role of Foot Stability before but today I want to share more insight into the big toe specifically for as you will soon see there is a correlation between big toe dysfunction and injury elsewhere in the body
Exercise Solutions For Weak Feet Creating Lower Limb Injuries
Our ability to walk, run and jump is all initiated by our feet. But it is not just walking or running, it is for any movement you do standing up, neural signalling begins at the feet as they are the first part of the body to feel the ground and tell the system what to do. The feet are loaded with thousands of nerve receptors that are very sensitive and designed to help us move. They tell the brain where you are, if you are balanced enough to move yet, and basically instigate movement before it even begins. The better the feet are functioning, the better the signal all the way up the kinetic chain, and the more efficiently we can move. Unfortunately, due to many factors ranging from poor footwear, lack of exercise, poor exercise choice etc, our feet become lazy and weak, and so begins the catastrophic destruction of our movements and joints. It is amazing the correlation between foot instability and knee pain or hip pain. I cannot tell you how many cases we have seen where the foot was the main problem with these injuries. Yet like many other injuries in the body, the area that causes the pain is rarely in pain itself. It sends the problems of instability and dysfunction to other areas. To make matters worse our current health and medical treatments are ignorant to looking for a cause and hell-bent on treating symptoms so this weakness or instability is often left unchecked and continue to cause pain and suffering. In this article, we will try to explain how the foot works and provide some simple exercise solutions to correcting any weakness and instability.