Are we looking at the wrong muscles to fix Plantar Fasciitis?

Today I want to do a quick PSA on plantar fasciitis, and hopefully teach you something that you haven’t heard before about this issue. I know a lot of us already know that the calf muscles can be tight and causing some of that pain in the bottom, but one of the areas of our body that we’re actually not paying enough attention to are the muscles on the front of your shin. And you’ll notice that those are mostly on the outside of your shin. And those are what I am talking about. The muscles that dorsiflex the ankle, or pick your ankle up, as well as the muscles that dorsiflex the toes or pick them up This creates an issue with the length-tension relationship of the muscles in the bottom of your foot.

Now, what do I mean by that? I’m going to have you do an experiment. Hold your hand out to the side, extend your wrist as far as you can, and then make a tight fist. What you’re noticing is that you can’t do that. The reason this is, is because the muscles on the bottom of my forearm are overstretched. They’re in a non-optimal position to do their jobs. If I brought my wrist down to neutral, I can squeeze all day. But up in this position, they’re too stretched. That’s exactly what’s happening in the bottom of your foot. If you’re too tight up on the top of your foot here, and even in these toes, what ends up happening is these muscles on the bottom of your foot are put in a biomechanical disadvantage and can’t do their job.

The most important [job] is to maintain an arch in your foot. A lot of you with plantar fasciitis probably hear the word pronation, or collapsing of that arch. And [pronation] is a real problem because you likely have a plantar fascia that’s already overstretched and irritated, and every single step you take, it just gets stretched more and more and irritated all day every day with every single step. So it’s something that we’d want to be able to control a lot more efficiently with the muscles on the bottom of your foot. So one of the first things that we’ll do is we’ll try to attack that. What you may notice is that if this is a problem that you have is that when you pull those muscles on the front of your shin into a stretched position, you’ll feel some cramping on the bottom of your foot.

That’s actually indicating [most of the time] that those muscles [in the bottom of the foot] are turning on, they’re finally getting to do their job. And that cramping is them trying to activate. You’re getting some actual activity out of them. Now here’s the rub, this is not everything that you need to do for plantar fasciitis, but I’m hoping what this video does for you is shows you that there are some things out there that may not necessarily be common knowledge and shows that this can be a very treatable condition. I hate hearing that people have been dealing with this for years and years, without any answers to the problem, because it is such a solvable problem. And I would love to be able to help any of you out there that have this issue. If that is you, and you’re like, “wow, that’s something new. I love that. I want to learn more.”

It’s really easy. And more importantly, it’s free to do through me. All you have to do is either give us a call at (336) 933-1544 or you can sign up for a free discovery visit where you come in here, you get to be one-on-one with me, and I get to actually look at how you’re moving, look at what’s going on with your foot and put together a plan for you to get better.