Plantar Fasciitis Stretches and Exercises | How I Helped My Client Reduce Pain
Hey guys, Michael Hughes here with Gymnazo. Have you ever heard the word pain get thrown out to you from a client in a session? Or an athlete as they’re in a group workout session, and you freeze in your tracks? Like, dang it, what do I do? Well, we’ve been taught that as a trainer, we don’t mess with pain that we refer it out to specialists. And I’m here to challenge that thought process, that you may be the best thing for that client or that athlete in that moment. A mentor of mine taught me that if bad movement got people into pain, then therefore good movement can take them out of pain. Now, this goes against all protocol, but I believe that you are the specialist in movement. Because remember, bad movement, Gotham, their good movement will take them out of their, you know, movement better than any other specialist into the doctor in the industry. In fact, the more you can invest in it, the more you can therefore treat and take care of clients in your facility. In that session, perhaps. So I’m going to go through a client story of mine named Amy, and how she presented plantar fascia pain, and how I’m gonna tell you the sequence and the process, the thought process that I went through to take her out of planet fascia pain, and you can do it too. I’m excited to bring you through
let me give you a little backstory about Amy. Amy had this plantar fascia pain for a few weeks, but she was bad enough where she ended up telling me about it in a workout. But the weekend prior, she goes to her daughter’s soccer games, and another parent on the team is a podiatrist. And they were just chatting back and forth hanging out, my foot hurts, etc, etc. And the doctor said, Well, how did you come on in and she did what she did, she got a few cortisone shots. And the doctor said, Hey, this gets worse and worse, worse and worse for what I’m seeing your foot doing. Probably going to need surgery eventually. Well, me not being the one who wants to jump right into surgery, eventually told me and I said well, how about let’s book a session together? Well, she said fine deal. Well, Sunday came around again. And there’s a podiatrist soccer friend again. And she said to him that, hey, I’m going to go see my trainer. He has full confidence that he can take care of that, that plantar fascia pain, no problem. Well, here’s what the podiatrist said. He kind of looked into says, Well, I doubt that’s gonna happen. And best of luck to you. I’ll probably see in my office in another week. So he told me that story. I’m like, ooh, the God has been thrown down. I’m excited to share what biomechanics can do to fix plantar fascia pain. So let me break down the sequence that I went through with Amy. So Amy’s foot was a problem. That’s where the pain was. So typically, least from what the podiatrist was probably thinking, like, oh, the problems the foot, Let’s inject the foot, let’s make that fashio a little tighter. You know, it’s bring it together a bit more because obviously being yanked and being pulled apart? Well, from a basic training standpoint, I think level one, oh, that’s just let’s just foam roll the plantar fascia of the foot, you know, let’s roll it, you know, maybe do kind of foot little stretches, bringing a little towel and do little towel, scrunch, you know, let’s bring that together. But reality that’s base level thinking about how the plantar fascia actually works. Next level thinking you think, well, I should grab for the calf, I should make that calf have more resiliency, more elasticity in all three planes of motion because the foot and the ankle don’t just dorsiflexion plan effects, the biggest thing that the actual ankle does is invert and Eve hurt. And those motions need to happen in the capital certainly control that. So what if that doesn’t work? Well, even next level thinking is going after the hip and that hip flexor because that hip flexor needs to have enough rotational loading, basically stretching or eccentric movement to allow this femur to open up. So after foam rolling and stretching that hip flexor and that still doesn’t result in decrease plantar fascia discomfort, or the next level thinking the highest level that you can go to to really dial in. This is going after the thoracic spine and understand that the thoracic spine plays into a counter rotation with the pelvis. And if there is not enough top down flexibility through the internal extra obliques, even through the latissimus dorsi site even into the lateral core ribcage. We don’t have enough elasticity there that makes the pelvis have to compensate that makes the leg have to compensate that makes the calf have to compensate that makes the plantar fascia have to compensate and it’s a last in line. And if motion doesn’t come through here, here, here here, it has to come through the plantar fascia. Well, that was the case with Amy. We got after her thoracic spine, gave it enough extension gave it enough upside rotation. Give it enough upside lateral flexion to relieve the stress to provide the mobility, flexibility and therefore tension strength to take the hit appropriately, and the rest of the pieces fell into place. And in one session, one session, her plantar fascia push off pain went down by 80%. And less than one hour. All we have to do is train it, conditioned it give it more and more flexibility to the days to come. And guess what she saw that that podiatrist on that next Sunday, and she was walking with a whole different stride. And that podiatrist saw. And guess what Amy said, a trainer took care of 80% of my pain and that was three days ago still have 80% less pain. I’m doing these drills, I can control my plantar fascia pain, whenever it pops up, especially in the morning time I do my stretches, I do my drills and remains where it was three days later. And guess what her plantar fascia pain went away, a few days later, still remains gone. And that podiatrist won’t still hasn’t called us to want to connect. But that makes sense. We’ll win the next one.
So let me wrap this all up to you. Remember when my mentor said that bad movement gets people into pain? Well, Amy’s bad movement through this motion right here, essentially trickled all the way down into her plantar fascia. And all we did is give her good movement through here through the thoracic spine, and that trickle all the way down again, to her plantar fascia. So good movement. That’s what trainers do. We prescribe, we promote good movement. And it took me years to unpack this level of thinking, this level of understanding the engineering behind the body. And what I hope that this video did is give you a quick synopsis of what you can do to unpack and understand your clients aches and pains in sessions. So you can therefore create your own systems just like we did in gym nozzle to give this level of quality. And there you can start to build the trust with your clients with your athletes so that the medical community starts to pay attention to what you’re doing in your community, and starts changing the game and changing your business and therefore changing how you affect other people’s lives. So I hope this gave you a lot of value. And you can apply it to even your clients that are in your facility or virtually right now. If you want to have the knowledge, the skills, the expertise to solve problems, like I just described in this video, then I want you to check out this link right up here. It’s called the multi dimensional movement coaching program. And this is where we dive in deep, where we coach you one on one and through our course to understand the complexities and yet the systems and the protocols that we go through that you can take this exact knowledge, implement it to your clientele, to your community. So you can not only have the skills, have the knowledge, but build the reputation that your training facility is not just some random training facility, but it’s skilled, it’s purposeful, and it does things that are different. So check it out, and hope to see you there.
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