Welcome back to FixPF! A Renewal Physical Therapy campaign to give everyone the tools they need to fix plantar fasciitis heel pain so they can spend less on medical professionals and more on the rest of their lives.
Each episode will be a fictional case study based on real patients, and research articles from pubmed.
Today we will be talking about Samson. Samson is a 35 year old runner. When people yell at him “What are you running from?!” he politely responds, “Mediocrity!” Which is usually never that satisfying because by then those rude people have already driven out of earshot at a speed of 32 mph. But he still enjoys the quip.
His marathon two years ago went really well. He had a PR of 4 hours and 40 minutes. He took a little bit of time off after the marathon, ran two half marathons the year after and he is currently training for a marathon.
However, his training for this marathon is not going so well. He has started to have heel pain that is moderate to severe in the mornings when he wakes up, gets better as he moves throughout the day, really gets better during the first six miles of a run, but really escalates when he gets past mile 7 or 8.
He loves running. He loves running mechanics. He loves trying to figure out how to keep running no matter what. The heel pain is bad enough, but the heel pain preventing him from running is sheer torture. So, what does he do?
He googles it.
And he finds out that walking and running mechanics basically make his body act like an upside down pendulum. If his body were the pendulum of a clock his head would be swinging back and forth while his feet act as momentary fixed points on the ground preventing him from falling flat on his face.
This is interesting to Samson, but doesn’t fix his heel pain. So he reaches out to a local physical therapist who specializes in plantar fasciitis treatments and who doesn’t want to waste anyone’s time or money. He learns two things: 1) His calf muscles are the culprit and getting them loosened up almost entirely fixed his problem, and 2) His calf muscles are getting overworked from preventing his head from hitting the ground every stride he takes.
He gets his calf muscles loosened up. He strengthens his hamstrings and glutes, and voila, his upside down pendulum is back in tact and he is back on track to getting his next marathon PR.
Does any of this story sound like yours? Or are you involved in a sport other than running but are having this kind of pain? We would love to give you the tools you need to take care of your plantar fasciitis heel pain for the glory of God and the good of others!
Sincerely,
Todd Rundell, PT