A deep dive into what plantar fasciitis is, what causes plantar fasciitis, how to treat it and how to ensure you never have to deal with it again!
In a previous segment we used my brother Leon as a case study, which gave us valuable insight into the condition. But now as promised, we are going to get a bit more specific for our community of runners out there.
As runners, we develop a tunnel vision-like approach to our training and by extension to our lifestyle. And as great as this might be for our goals and or individual successes; it does leave us open to significant risk.
Top 5 Risk Factors for Plantar Fasciitis
Your age is a risk factor, as much as we don’t want to be ageist but honesty is also a main characteristic of our values on this platform. The older you get, the less loading your body can withstand. Therefore your age does increase your risk of developing overuse injuries such as plantar fasciitis.
Similarly, your job can predispose you to developing this condition. Having a job in the medical industry or hospitality perhaps, where you spend a disproportionate amount of time on your feet. These types of jobs do increase your risk for plantar fasciitis. I mean if you’re getting 15 000 steps in a day and then you go home and run an additional 7 miles or whatever. Can you see how quickly overloading or overtraining can happen?
On the other hand, weight, muscular imbalances and footwear are risk factors that we, despite what you might think, are easily controllable. But like my professor repeated so many times: “You can only control what you understand”. A bit on the enlightening side of things but you get the just of it. Luckily, you guys have us to help you.
How to Prevent Plantar Fasciitis from Flaring Up Again
For lack of a better term, prevention is better than a cure when it comes to plantar fasciitis. Hence why we are discussing prevention before we’re going to discuss treatment and remedies for the condition.
As a runner you do need to be more pragmatic in your approach to pre-habilitation. This applies to people who have had plantar fasciitis and those that have not. These are our preventative strategies to help prevent plantar fasciitis from developing or flaring up again.
How to Treat Plantar Fasciitis: Our Go To Tips, Tricks and Remedies!
Okay so we’ve covered the prevention side of things let’s discuss the cure. It is also at this point that I am obliged to provide you with a disclaimer that this is in fact NOT A CURE FOR PLANTAR FASCIITIS. This remains our opinion based on years of scientific fact and clinical knowledge. So please don’t come at me in the comments guys.
As we were saying, as runners there remains a significant probability that we will experience some form of overuse or inflammatory condition sometime throughout our running journeys’. This is almost a given and thus the likelihood of you having to wrestle with a bout of plantar fasciitis is higher than you might care to think.
And do you know what? That is perfectly okay. Why? Well because we might have the right solution for you to be able to manage and treat your plantar fasciitis.
Treat the Symptoms, Rehab the Cause!
More often than not, plantar fasciitis becomes a recurring and awfully annoying condition. This is because most people only end up treating the symptoms. “Oh you’ve got pain? Here, drink this amazing non-steroidal anti-inflammatory!” Sound familiar?
So what ends up happening is we fall into a trap of treating symptoms persistently without ever addressing the cause or root of your problem. That’s my modus operandi with all of my patients who suffer from plantar fasciitis. I make it abundantly clear that we have this two step approach.
And here is how you treat the cause of plantar fasciitis:
Exercise | Sets | Reps | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Incline calf stretch | 2 | 60 s | Two sets per leg |
Exercise | Sets | Reps | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Soleus stretch | 2 | 60 s | Two sets per leg |
Exercise | Sets | Reps | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Calf and Tibialis release | 2 | 60 s | Two sets per leg |
Exercise | Sets | Reps | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Water Sprints/Running | 5 | 15 m | Focus on controlling your weight distribution |
Exercise | Sets | Reps | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Heel walks and toe walks | 5 | 25 | Focus on maintaining your balance when shifting weight from one side to the next. |
Exercise | Sets | Reps | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Standing calf raises | 5 | 20 | Focus on controlling the movement throughout the entire rep. |
Exercise | Sets | Reps | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Towel Pulls | 5 | 20 | Try to limit ankle movement. IE: Use your forefoot only. |
As you can see we have provided you with more than just a few tips to treat and rehabilitate your condition. We really wanted to add value with this series so we’ve thought what the heck? Let’s give the people what they want! Jokes a side, all this is a conservative approach to a tricky condition. We’re trying to avoid medications and surgeries as best as we can. However, if after you have consistently applied these strategies and your condition seems to get worse, we urge you to seek medical treatment by your physiotherapist or primary care physician.
And this leads us to our final segment of this series:
Heel Spurs vs Plantar Fasciitis
So let’s say you do all of the prescribed exercises and you take all our advice and nothing changes. Your symptoms don’t get any less and your pain seems to be getting worse. There is a high likelihood that your plantar fasciitis has developed into a heel spur, a 15% chance to be exact.
This is where things get a bit more serious. Heel spurs more often than not result in individuals that have plantar fasciitis and leave it untreated or wait too long to treat it. The persistent stress causes your body to deposit bony fragments to provide some stability to the compromised connective tissue fibers. Over time this forms a bony protrusion that may cause you significant pain and requires surgical intervention to be removed.
Misdiagnosis of this condition is quite frequent because it does present in the same clinical fashion as plantar fasciitis. Therefore, you would need a scan like an x-ray done to definitively discern whether you’re suffering from a classic case of plantar fasciitis or whether a heel spur has developed on your foot.
Final thoughts....
All in all, plantar fasciitis remains a very manageable and treatable condition. If you’re willing to commit the time to understand your anatomy and how your specific biomechanics work, you are already ten steps ahead of this condition.
Add in some consistent prehab and recovery work, we can almost guarantee (even though we can’t) that plantar fasciitis will be one struggle you won’t have to fight. So what are you waiting for, go ahead and implement all these tips, tricks and everything in between, into your training today! Until next time, we wish you nothing but pain free running!
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