plantar fasciitis and how to fix it

One of the most common injuries among endurance athletes. It really sucks. I had it twice during 3 years. I read lots of athletes' stories how they stop training for many weeks, how they go to massage therapists, etc. and so on.

It is all useless. You have to understand the human body is one huge kinetic chain where all muscles are in coordination and interconnected and our body has lots of tools for compensations. If something does not work the body will find a way to compensate creating overuse and too much stress somewhere else. The evolution equipped us for survival, not athletic performance. So, your body will not care about your 10KM PB but will create too much stress in area B if you have a weakness in area A in order to compensate.

Understanding that, we now can look closer at plantar fasciitis. It usually happens after tons of running and the thick wide fascia in your foot gets painful as hell. It gets painful and inflamed. Why inflamed? Inflammation is a defensive mechanism to protect weak and overused tissue against too much stress and overuse. Your body simply does not want you to contract the tissue forcefully. The pain and inflammation will prohibit you to do that.

So if the fascia is painful; is your foot the problem? Nope. Your inflamed fascia and the pain in your foot is just the symptom, not the cause. The tendon is stressed too much and overworked, it takes too much beating. Why?

Usually because of three problems, very often all of them at the same time:

1/ your gluteus medius is weak = does not stabilize the pelvis properly

2/ your leg goes into inner rotation destroying the ideal biomechanic pattern of your run (read = weak and tight glutes and weak and tight adductors)

3/ your calves are tight and weak

Because all of the above, the fascia in your foot must do the job of the weak muscles with stabilizing the foot arch. If not, the foot arch gets a bit lower and the amortization function of the foot is worse.

What to do? Yes, you can roll the foot with a lacrosse ball but it will only help a little and not solve the problem. Strengthen your glutes, strengthen your adductors, strengthen and stretch your calves. 

Quite often, strength training is the correct answer :)