[background music] Mark Threlfall: Now, if you're a runner,
chances are you've experienced some sort of foot pain over the years. It may be serious
or it may be absolutely nothing. Now, sometimes a small twinge in your foot can be completely
ignored and you can carry on with your running, but other times it's really important you back
off right away, you recover, and you avoid it from becoming a more serious injury.
It can be very confusing and hard to tell which is which and when you need to do either. In
today's video, I thought I'd delve into this broad world of foot pains and injuries. I'm going to be
running through some advices out there in terms of recognizing what your injury is, and the type
of foot pain you're getting, how to recover from that, and of course, how to avoid it altogether.
Now, obviously, today's video and the information in this video is certainly not a replacement for
a trained medical practitioner. Now, if you sense that you have a serious injury or you are simply
unsure, then they should definitely be your first port of call. In today's video, I am going to be
running through the most common types of injury and explaining what they are, how they may feel.
If you are unsure, then that may help you, and then also hopefully giving you the tools to help
manage your body better and help that injury. If you have got pain in your foot, then some of
the first things you should be thinking about are, where is that injury in the foot or where is that
pain? When are you experiencing that pain? What are you doing, and is there anything that you do
that helps it, makes it better or makes it worse? Now, I know they're pretty obvious things,
but it's amazing how many people don't take the time to take a step back and think about those,
because then it can allow you to identify what the injury is, and what the issue is, and therefore
the treatment needed for it, allowing you to recover and hopefully prevent you from having
that same injury in the future again. Now, let's talk through some of the most common injury types,
and of course, there are a whole host of different variations out there but generally speaking,
the treatments and the preventative measures for them are pretty well-aligned.
Generally speaking, pain in different parts of your foot will be caused by different irritations
or weaknesses in the many tendons, ligaments, muscles, or even the skeletal structure that makes
up your foot. Now, pain in the underside of your heel that can also run along the bottom of your
foot into your arch could be plantar fasciitis. This can be painful when you first step out of bed
in the morning or after long periods of rest and presents itself as a stabbing pain. Inflammation
of the plantar fasciitis tendon is the most common cause of foot pain, and it's a form of tendonitis.
It's typically categorized as an overuse injury. Following on from plantar fasciitis, we have
tendonitis itself. Now, tendinitis most commonly presents itself as
pain in the arch of the foot just here due to inflammation of the posterior tibial tendon.
That tendon supports the arch and runs along the inside of the foot. When inflamed, it can
feel like a stabbing or throbbing feeling in the arch either when running or even after running.
Now that, along with plantar fasciitis, is the two most common tendon injuries in the foot. Although,
tendonitis can also present itself in any of the other tendons in the foot when they're subjected
to a significant increase in workload. I actually have experienced it just a couple of years ago
along the top and the front of my foot, and it took quite a while to recover from.
Now moving on from the tendon issues, we've got stress fractures. Now, these can be equally
frustrating. It can occur in any of the bones that make up your foot but most commonly occur
in the metatarsals. The stress fractures usually build up over time but then suddenly present
themselves as a sharp pain, which can be confused with tendonitis. Even x-rays, unfortunately,
can struggle to pick up the stress fractures. One hack, if you can call it that, to try and
identify whether it's a stress fracture or not is to hop small and gently on the problematic foot.
If you feel a sharp acute pain, unfortunately, that could well mean that is a stress fracture.
I'm moving on to a different type of injury, bursitis. Now, foot bursitis is very common in
athletes. We have a fluid-filled sac in our foot called bursa. If that becomes inflamed, it could
be rather painful, it can be sore, and inflamed, and swollen, and also rather red. Most commonly
this pain is at the back of your heel. It can be quite disabling and painful to touch. It'll be
painful to walk and run with pain increasing when you stand on your tiptoes or bend your foot. Foot
bursitis can occur through repetitive actions, impact, or simply being on your feet too much.
A final issue, if you're experiencing pain in the arch of your foot or under your toes
and quite often find yourself unable to or struggling to walk after a long run,
then it could well be metatarsalgia, which I know sounds like a made-up word, but it is in fact
pain and inflammation towards the head of your metatarsals due to increased pressure on a small
spot of your foot, and therefore obviously taking quite a pounding. As with many of these injuries,
there is a direct result of quite often increasing your training volume too much and too quickly.
Hopefully, describing those common injuries has helped you to understand or maybe figure
out what is going on in your foot. Trauma is normally, just identifying it's one of the
hardest parts of the process. From here on, now it's just a case of addressing them and
treating it so that they recover and you can get back to running. If you are experiencing pain in
your foot that is stopping you from running or it's getting worse when you're running,
then the advice is to stop running for 72 hours at the very least. Rest the foot, ice the foot,
take an anti-inflammatory such as ibuprofen if suitable to hopefully bring any inflammation down.
Following this period, you can test your foot to see if the pain remains. If it does,
then immediately ease off whatever you're doing. Try gentle strengthening exercises
such as calf raises or ankle mobility work, but avoid anything that causes pain. The best remedy
for most of these injuries is either reducing your running volume and intensity significantly
or time away from running altogether until the pain is no longer present, allowing you
to build back up slowly. We've mentioned this before, but make sure you see a physio doctor if
injuries do persist after just a couple of weeks. Now, the next part of the puzzle is actually
identifying the cause of the injury altogether. Now, there is a list of the usual suspects when
it comes to these causes of injuries. It's a good idea to start by working through
this list as a process of elimination and finding out which one is or multiple things
are the cause for you. First up, running shoes, and these are often the first thing that runners
look at when they get injured. Have you just changed brand or model, or are your trainers
worn out so your foot is now moving around with no support, or do you even actually have the right
support for your foot in the first place? Now, running shoes get mentioned a lot and
this is because the support they provide or don't provide is maybe the question can be
the answer to a lot of issues, and injuries such as plantar fasciitis can be resolved
or prevented by using a more structured shoe or even an orthotic insole. It's also a good
practice to rotate the trainers that you run in. This is a really neat trick that will strengthen
all the muscles in your foot and lower leg to give you an all-around resilience against injury.
Next up we want to look at your training. Have you recently significantly increased
your training volume? If so, your body just may not have been ready for that level of overload and
it's resulted in this breakdown, irritation, and failure of your muscles, ligaments,
and tendons. Have a think back to the training that you've recently done or maybe you've got
in a plan that you can take a look back at. Ideally, you want to have these periods of
recovery after these periods of overload where you've increased. If you have
just increased your training over time with no recovery or just suddenly and quite instantly,
then your body just may not have had time to adapt. Going forwards from now, you want
factor in these periods of recovery and allow your body time to adapt and absorb all that hard work.
Then could it be due to an impact, a twist, or a fall, or something similar to that?
Have a think back, try and recall have you had any instances like that over the past months?
Because as small as they may seem, they can be exacerbated by training on top of them. I remember
just twisting my ankle and thinking nothing of it at the time but 50K later and later into the week,
I had a full-blown injury that I've struggled with for the next few weeks.
Listen to your body. If you have a current injury that you're trying to get over, then make sure you
give yourself time to recover from that. There is no point trying to train through them or trying to
train through little niggles because you could well prolong them, make it worse, and you find
yourself just limping along for months on end. Also, could it be sleep and diet? I know it
sounds odd, but have you recently had a period of poor sleep or poor diet?
Both of these factors can actually have a significant impact on the susceptibility to injury
as a body becomes less robust to the stress we put it through in everyday training. It's a good
practice to monitor sleep quality and quantity. This doesn't have to be an exact daily metric,
but remaining aware of how well you're rested will give you a good indication of when you
can handle high training load, or when you need to back off and give your body a bit more TLC.
Finally, we've got running dynamics. Now, this is an important one because running dynamics
can be the cause of some long-term injuries and can also be one of the hardest to fix because
our running technique and form is almost ingrained into us from years of running. It can be simple
things as little as heel striking, and that's creating excessive force through our foot and
our lower limbs each and every time we strike our foot. Or it can be weakness through the
stabilizing muscles in our hips and our glutes and that's leaving our foot quite exposed.
There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to running dynamics, however, there are certain
things such as weak or imbalances in our gait that do regularly cause running injuries and I
would recommend heading on over to our channel, checking out some of our technique's videos,
form videos. We also have a ton of drills on there which I really would recommend, because
that will allow you to work on good technique and also working on some of those weaknesses.
If you have any questions please do drop them in the comments section down below. Of course, if you
do have a big injury or something that's causing a lot of pain, you've been out of running for a
significant period of time, I would seriously recommend getting some expert, professional
advice, and even heading into a running shop to have your shoes looked at and your gait. Now do
remember you can head on over to our GTN social media channels, give them a follow, and don't
forget to give us a subscribe just down below. [00:11:34] [END OF AUDIO]