The Importance of Soft Tissue Work

Soft tissue work and its use in lower limb therapy.

If you’re struggling with pain from an injury in your feet, ankles, or lower limbs, and the impacts this can have on your mobility and quality of life, a course of soft tissue mobilisation can help to restore your soft tissue function and speed up your recovery process.

What Is Soft Tissue Mobilisation?

Soft tissue mobilisation focuses on medically massaging the soft tissues in the foot, around the ankle, and in the lower limb. This can help to provide pain relief for people suffering with issues caused by soft tissue injuries, and biomechanical dysfunctions such as:

• Sprains and strains
• Contusions
• Tendinitis
• Bursitis
• Stress injuries
• Plantar fasciitis
• Shin splints
• Morton’s neuroma
• Metatarsalgia
• Achilles tendonitis
• IT band friction syndrome (lateral knee pain)
• Ankle ligament tears

How Does Soft Tissue Mobilisation Work?

When areas in your lower limbs are damaged, it can cause ruptures, tension, and even scar tissue. On a microscopic level, this may look like fibres that are thick, tangled, and filled with small blood vessels and nerves, that send pain signals to your brain. Soft tissue mobilisation promotes healing and reduces pain in a number of ways:

1. It can help to realign and straighten out any cross fibres in your muscle causing tension, otherwise known as ‘knots’
2. It increases blood flow to the area, which helps to promote the natural healing process
3. It reduces the toughness of scar tissue, by gently softening and straightening the fibres

More often than not, the site of pain is not the actual cause of the pain, and so muscles, ligaments and structures higher up your limb are always assessed and targeted as well as the location of concern.

Soft tissue work can also be an effective tool to support other podiatry work such as gait analysis and corrective orthotic use or footwear, as it allows podiatrists to use massage techniques to decrease tension and encourage. For example, with shin splints, an orthotic will correct the mechanical imbalance going on; however, if those soft tissues are damaged then using soft tissue mobilisation will help to speed up the healing process.

What About Foot Mobilisation And Dry Needling?

Dry needling and foot mobilisation often go hand-in-hand with soft tissue work:

• Dry needling uses very thin needles without any medication to treat pain, heal and restore muscle and fascia function. It involves inserting a needle into an active trigger point, causing the muscle to release tension, therefore reducing pain levels and optimising function.

• Foot mobilisation therapy (FMT) involves hands-on manipulation, or movement, of stiff, dysfunctional joints in the feet to improve joint alignment, release tension and help your feet and legs function more efficiently. This encourages muscles, tendons and ligaments to work efficiently, improves the range of motion in your joints, improves your postural stability and balance, prevents falls, and allows injuries to heal properly by promoting healthy movement and reducing strain.

If you’d like to learn more about soft tissue therapy and how it can benefit you, our podiatrists are here to help, with a comprehensive examination and a range of solutions to support your needs. To book an appointment with one of our friendly podiatrists, contact us here.