Heel Pain: Causes & Treatments
Heel pain is one of the most common and debilitating conditions treated in Physical Therapy today.
Patients arriving with heel pain have usually already tried many other therapies and reported having the condition for longer periods of time than any other condition.
Ineffective Treatments
Patients with heel pain had usually already tried at least three other treatments before they began healing with a simple treatment.
Other treatments that had failed to make any difference included wearing a boot for six weeks (the boot of shame!). So unfair and a waste of time.
NB: in fact wearing a boot to treat the heel pain symptoms will actually make you worse in the long-term. Why? Because not only does wearing a boot not treat the specific cause of heel pain, it actually promotes muscle atrophy wasting or shrinking of all of the foot and ankle muscles and limits/excludes the patient from participating in physical activity which is detrimental for both mental and physical fitness… crazy! Don’t wear the boot!
Other Ineffective Treatments include:
• Massaging in the bottom of the foot
• Graston technique to the tendons (ouch)
• Prolonged bed rest
• Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory: Advil, Aleve & prescriptions
• Injections - weaken tendinous and ligamentous structures, not treating the cause
• Electrical stimulations
• Ultrasound
• Taping
• Night splints
• Shockwave therapy
• Surgery
• Heel braces and bandages
• Rocker and slant board stretches
• Non-custom made orthotics
Heel pain falls into three major categories:
-
Sever's Disease
8-15 years old
-
Achilles Tendonitis
16-40 years old
-
Plantar Fasciitis
30-65 years old
Dysfunction of the Calf Complex
These different heel pain diseases appear in the population at different age ranges but, interestingly, are all manifestations of one single underlying common cause:
Dysfunction of the calf complex - In other words, A TIGHT CALF!
Example of each:
- 11-year-old boy with sever’s disease, Soccer player who was put into a boot
- 37-year-old accountant with Achilles tendinitis jogs on the weekend
- 42-year-old housewife with plantar fasciitis who just wants to walk the dog
- 37-year-old Woman whose calf implants went wrong
Each is a distinctly different diagnosis, with slightly different locations of pain, however they all share the same underlying cause.
The Calf muscle is unique, as it has 2 powerful heads merging into a single tendon, (the Achilles tendon) and attaching at just one place – the HEEL BONE.
The calf is one of the only muscle groups that is so powerful it can not only lift your entire body weight on its own, it can also accelerate your body so quickly that you can momentarily launch yourself against gravity, otherwise known as jumping!
In fact, the calf is so powerful that in Sever’s Disease the calf is stronger than the immature heel bone and to a certain extent, it actually starts pulling the heel bone growth plate apart!
In Achilles Tendinitis the calf is so strong that the Achilles becomes overloaded beyond its capacity and becomes inflamed.
In Plantar Fasciitis the Calf pulls on the heel bone so hard that the fascial attachment at the front of the heel bone becomes so taught and overloaded that it becomes inflamed.
In each case we see that the strength of the calf and excessive tension in the calf is the cause of the dysfunction. This is the same reason why it is so difficult to treat. Just stretching the calf alone will have limited, or no impact on heel pain.
Although ultimately stretching and down regulating the tone of the calf complex is the goal, the muscles' sheer strength and resilience to deformation is a roadblock to success. Stretching alone just can’t overcome the strength and tightness of a dysfunctional calf complex.
So what can you do?
The secret is in how you trick the calf to release so that it can be stretched effectively – and take pressure off of the heel bone. This requires deep foam rolling with your CalfPRO® Rx Foam Roller, focusing on the soft tissue of the calf and then an immediate, leveraged calf stretch on CalfPRO®.
Because I am so passionate about sharing my unique and highly effective solution for heel pain with you, I have developed the CalfPRO® , to alleviate tension in the calf complex and permanently maintain a pain free heel. The CalfPRO® is the only calf stretching device in the world that can comfortably fix the heel in place and allow a leveraged stretch of the foot and ankle complex.
CalfPRO is now available here!
CalfPRO® is The World’s First Leveraged Calf Stretcher! (UK 🇬🇧 local shipping)
LEARN MORE
The Benefits of Healthy Calves
In just one use of CalfPRO®, you will notice an extreme sense of comfort and relief throughout your feet, calves, and hamstrings.