6 Quick Ways To Get Severe Heel Pain From Plantar Fasciitis Under Control

Plantar fasciitis, heel pain can get quite severe. You know, it’s especially bad when you feel it every day with those first steps, getting out of bed in the morning. And if you’re feeling it all the time, it doesn’t go away at all.

Even after you’ve warmed up a bit than it is really far gone, you’ve got to get the pain under control in order to put yourself in a position where you can treat the root of the problem and fix your plantar fasciitis for the long term.

In this video, I’m going to give you six quick ways to get severe heel pain from plantar fasciitis under control. The first way to get plantar fasciitis, heel pain under control is to get off your foot and using crutches like this helps out tremendously. And it’s okay if you toe touch like she’s doing right here.

But if you can not put your normal pressure on your heel, basically you have to take enough pressure off for it to not hurt. That way you let that plantar fasciitis heal the fascia itself will begin to go through its normal healing process and put you in a position to where it’s not so tender in the morning when you put pressure through there.

This is rarely ever recommended by doctors or physical therapists. Because they’re looking at plantar fasciitis as some sort of other injury. They’re not looking at it as a ligament injury or ligament sprain, just like you would sprain your knee or sprain your wrist, it needs to be treated the same way because the plantar fascia is made out of the same structures.

So it just makes sense to take pressure off of it. You would brace an ankle sprain, you embrace a knee sprain, you’d brace a wrist sprain. And the whole reason for bracing is to take pressure off and control the forces going through that ligament.

The problem with the plantar fascia it’s on the bottom of your foot and bracing, it doesn’t do the exact same thing, you need to take pressure off of it completely. And I recommend doing this over the boots because sometimes you’ll be recommended a boot one of those big black boots that you strap on and it’s kind of rounded on the bottom seam kind of rock your weight onto it, but that’s still putting weight through the plantar fascia.

And it actually usually makes your walking really bad and can cause problems in your other side. So I would rather use crutches like this and of course crutches can cause problems during the arms. But in my experience, this has been the better option. This heals the foot the heel pain for plantar fascia much faster than using the boots.

Typically my patients will take two to four weeks before they feel like they can begin to put weight on their foot a lot more comfortably. And at the same time we’re doing other treatments to strengthen muscles and to make sure that plantar fasciitis gets under control. The second tip is to use a soft cushiony insole and I don’t have one here.

Thankfully I’m not suffering from plantar fasciitis today, but this is pretty close to it. These are the olukai brand shoes that I wear on just about every video I’ll put a link to these in the description below. They come with this really nice soft cushiony insole. There’s softer ones out there, there’s some that have memory foam in them.

These don’t have memory foam, they have like a gel, and these come with the shoe but you can always buy these over the counter and put them in your shoes. But I think these shoes are stylish Of course, you know they’re really nice. And they come with this awesome insole that they’re kind of built around.

So I liked them because they just work with the insole very well. But using something to cushion your heel makes a tremendous difference. Obviously if you’ve been dealing with plantar fasciitis for a while, you’ve probably already noticed that walking around barefoot just doesn’t feel the best.

But if you get some slippers on or some good supportive shoes, you tend to feel better. So it makes sense to get the softest most cushiony insole that you can find instead of using a hard insole because you see those as well. And I’ve even seen custom made insoles for plantar fasciitis that are rock solid that they don’t have any cushion at all on them. And I’m scratching my head saying Who the heck made this for you, it is not helping you out.

Maybe it’s positioning your foot better. But it is not allowing that plantar fasciitis to calm down because every time you go step onto it, it’s like you’re stepping on a hard floor barefoot because that’s what’s right below your heel. The third quickest way is to begin to get mobility in your toes and your foot, the middle of your foot. And the way you can do that is by curling your toes all the way down just like that.

Just make sure you don’t cramp in your foot muscles. And then come up and extend your toes and what you’ll find is when you come up, your toes are going to want to spread apart just like that. And then when you come down, toes are going to want to come together, that’s totally fine.

You just go up and down and wiggle your feet like this 20 or 30 reps every hour, it’s important that you do this hourly because that frequency begins to get the joints within your foot and within your toes to free up and that usually wakes up the muscles in there as well. And that begins to take pressure off that plantar fasciitis.

The fourth thing you can do here is toe curls like we did just a moment ago, but only focusing on going down and giving yourself pressure with your hand to make sure that your toes curl all the way because without this hand pressure Take your hand off for just a moment.

You’re toes may not bend as much as possible, you may have one toe that kind of pops up like in this case, this third toe doesn’t want to quite come down. And that’s a sign that you have a slight weakness in your toe muscles and that specific muscle.

So getting your hand on your foot allows you to get a more uniform bend through all the toes, and then you’re using your foot muscles to try to help so it’s a combination of your hand pushing down, and the actual foot muscles pulling the toes inwards to get the best contraction possible all the way.

But still don’t go so hard that you start getting a cramping your foot back off to the intensity that you can do this without getting a cramp and then hold it there for 10 seconds. Repeat this 10 times. So you should be doing 10 second holds, take a quick break, and then do another 10 second hold, take another break and repeat that 10 times.

Doing this every hour is a way to progress from the toe curling up and down that we just did a second ago, I have some patients who like to combine this one and they’ll do the other one, they’ll do all of them. Some will just progress from one to the other ones, they feel like they just want to work on curling their toes.

Either way, you need to make sure that you’re doing something very frequently, like every hour, in order to wake up those muscles and keep your joints mobile to take pressure off that plantar fascia, let me show you an alternative way to do this one that doesn’t require you grabbing your foot in case you can’t reach.

Now the way to do this is to use the floor instead of your hands. So you’re just going to push your toes under your foot like this. And you can control the pressure that you’re putting on your foot because this can be a big stretch. But you’re still thinking about using your foot muscles to curl your toes, you’re just using the floor to push your toes all the way in, still 10 second holds and then back off for a second.

And then go again 10 times you can do more than that. You just want to make sure that you can tolerate it and that you feel that your heel pain is improving. As the days go on during this exercise.

The fifth way to get some relief is to progress that last exercise to now just curling your toes all the way and add this motion where you bring your feet inwards, where you’re tipping them this way inwards, try to bring the soles together, some people have a lot of flexibility in the soles of their feet can practically touch, you need to just make sure you’re curling your toes at the same time, hold it there for 10 seconds and do this 10 times and this needs to be done hourly, so that you can build up the strength in your arch muscles and take that pressure off your plantar fascia.

The sixth way to begin to get relief is after you’ve progressed your toes curling, those muscles have gotten stronger, then you got to do some heel raises like this. So first, you’re going to grab the ground with your toes.

So just avoid curling your toes under your foot, you have to stretch them out and grab the ground. And while trying to maintain that toe grab, you’re going to raise your heels up and hold it there for 10 seconds focusing on going up as high as you possibly can.

Don’t let it drop down. And then after those 10 seconds, you can take a break and slowly descend. Just avoid plopping down on your heel. Because you’re going to set off the irritation and your plantar fasciitis, it’s very important that you grab those toes because then you’re forcing your foot to use those toe muscles and support that plantar fascia so it takes pressure off of it.

If you come up without grabbing the toes, of course, you’re going to work out your calf muscles, put tension through your Achilles tendon, but then you’re going to be forcing all the pressure in your foot on the bottom of your foot to be focused on that plantar fascia. And that’s what we’re trying to relieve here.

So you have to teach your foot to begin to use your toe muscles. With virtually every motion, this is the way we like to start to do that. Once you start doing that heel raise exercise, instead of doing them hourly, you got to look at doing 50 to 100 reps. And if you can’t do 50 reps yet, totally understandable, you may need to gain some more strength first start with just five reps or 10 reps, or 15 or 20.

Whatever you can do. As long as you’re using your toes properly and you’re coming up all the way it’s not a good idea to do that exercise yet. If you can’t quite use your toes. You might need to wait on that one. Go back to just using the crutches.

You might just worry about some insoles, insoles and crutches and begin to do some of those toe curling exercises, the basic movements or begin to do the whole overpressure find what combination of these six things you need to be doing that suits your current inflammation level and your plantar fascia, my hope for you is that you begin to get that plantar fasciitis under control so that every morning, when you take those first few steps, it’s a little more tolerable and a little better and a little better.

And as the weeks go by, you should feel like it’s almost completely gone. And then you need to work on getting even more strength, which there’s other things to do at that point. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. Please give it a thumbs up if you liked it. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel so that you don’t miss out on any of the helpful videos. We post each and every week and turn on your notifications so that you’re notified as soon as we release a video. I hope to see you in the next video. Bye