Sore Feet!
Many people have sore feet and their complaints cover a wide range of symptoms, including:
bunnions
hammertoes
neuroma
flat feet
plantar fasciitis (or fasciosis)
Achilles tendinopathy
and more.
Posture alignment training includes information about these and other foot issues, along with suggested exercises that might help clients find relief or complete cessation of their symptoms. The training also provides the therapist with various testing strategies to track down the possible reasons for the pain (or foot dysfunction resulting in pain). These tests can be very revealing and surprise the client, who often believes the issue must be the foot - after all, that is where the pain is. Right?
Here's a good example from my own practice. I asked one of my clients - a young mother with intermittent plantar fascia pain on one foot and Achilles tendon pain on the other - to walk down her long hallway, barefoot. (At this time she had more plantar fascia pain than tendon pain.) I told her to try to avoid limping and to tell me what her pain level was. She did, and reported the pain to be about a level 7 (with 1 being the least and 10 being the most pain). I then had her place her hands behind her head, fingers laced, open her elbows as far as she comfortably could while keeping her eyes gazing forward (not down), and asked her to walk down the hall again.
She walked down the hall. I noticed that she paused at the end of the hall and stood facing away from me before she turned. When she turned around her eyes were wide and she said, "There's no pain, Grace." She walked back and said, "It's zero. I don't get it! Why is there no pain?"
I told her that what this test revealed to me is that the position of her upper body was influencing the rest of her body in a way that caused her feet to hurt - whether it was simply because they were striking the ground in a dysfunctional way or tightening the fascia across the bottoms of her feet or causing all of the muscles in the back of her legs to tighten and cause pain in the Achilles tendon - we didn't yet know exactly what was going on. However, knowing that the pain disappeared entirely made it easy for me to begin to design a routine for her that would first place her upper body into more extension, and then bring her hips into better alignment with her newly extended thoracic back. This routine alone greatly reduced her foot pain, but we added a few other exercises to it, that are specific to the types of foot pain she had. I'll write about those exercises in a later blog post.
