YOUR SHOES MATTER: I had a client last week complain of pain at his achilles tendon which represented as a tendinopathy. His history involved having to wear steel capped ankle high boots to work for 12 hours a day and the pain had started up around the same time as starting this new job. After assessing his gait (walking) it was obvious his ankles were not utilising their necessary range of movement in two of the three planes of movement (transverse/rotational & coronal/lateral). This meant that he was predominantly propelling himself forward with his calf muscles (in the sagittal/forward & back plane) and not spreading the load as he should, ultimately overloading his achilles tendon with every step. Add the heavy steel caps to this and you will soon find pain is the result. Our ankles should freely move through supination and pronation with each step we take (see 2nd pic), otherwise the movement will be compensated for elsewhere. My client had the mobility in his ankles but his brain had been forced to stop utilising this movement due to the restrictive footwear. We spent the session working on retraining the brain to utilise this movement through the ankles, sent him home with homework to re-enforce this and lucky for him he only had one shift left in the job so no more silly boots! Take a minute to think about your footwear and do your best to make sure you are not restricting your ankle mobility, your ankles NEED to be mobile. If you cannot get out of wearing sensible shoes for work then do your ankles a favour and spend as much time as possible barefoot around the house to try and balance things out.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 04:30:00 +0000