With plantar fasciitis heel pain being one of the most common problems seen and treated by our podiatrists, when patients make a booking with us, there’s often an important question they ask: what can I be doing at home to help my heel pain? It’s a great question – and there are definitely several steps you can take to support your recovery long before you step into our clinic.
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Towel stretches before you get out of bed in the morning
While you sleep at night, your plantar fascia tissue, which spans the bottom of your foot from your heel to your toes, relaxes – just like the rest of your body. This means that the moment you step onto the ground, it’ll be getting stretched (which it’s not used to after a long overnight rest), and leading to tightness and pain.
An effective way to help this is by getting a towel (or exercise band if you have one – or anything of this nature), and wrapping it behind the ball of your foot, holding the sides of the towel or band in each hand. With your leg straight out in front of you, gently pull your foot towards you, ‘flattening’ the arch and giving your plantar fascia a gentle stretch. This can help take some of the edge off your first few painful steps in the morning.
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Wearing good, supportive shoes inside your home
Good, supportive shoes like sneakers are essential out of the home because of the way they hold and stabilise your ankle while keeping your arch supported – and so keeping your plantar fascia under less strain. So what happens when you go inside the house and switch to socks or bare feet? The fascia is now unsupported, and being exposed to tension forces. This is where temporarily having a pair of indoor sneakers can go a long way in keeping your fascia supported so it can continue to recover and repair all day long.
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Rolling the bottom of your foot with a frozen water bottle or tennis ball
Rolling the bottom of the foot with a frozen water bottle can help alleviate pain associated with plantar fasciitis by reducing inflammation, stretching the plantar fascia, and reducing blood flow to the affected area. The coolness of the water bottle helps reduce inflammation by constricting blood vessels and thus reducing blood flow, which can help relieve swelling and some pain. It’s also an effective stretch to help ease the tension on the fascia.
Tennis balls or other spiky balls, which are more practically accessible, work in much the same way to help stretch and reduce the tension on the fascia, except without the frozen anti-inflammatory benefits. If you sit at work, it’s a good idea to keep one of these balls beneath your desk and try to roll your foot over it every hour, or before you need to stand up.
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Calf stretching
Many people don’t realise that the plantar fascia and the Achilles tendon are very much connected, given that the plantar fascia inserts into the bottom of the heel and the Achilles into the back of the heel. This means that when the Achilles tendon and the calf muscles are tight, they can place additional strain on the plantar fascia, exacerbating a person’s pain and discomfort.
Stretching the calf muscles can help to lengthen them, in turn helping to alleviate tension and strain on the fascia – and all the painful and uncomfortable symptoms that follow. In addition, calf stretching can help improve flexibility and range of motion in the foot and ankle, which can help prevent future injuries and reduce the risk of developing plantar fasciitis in the first place.
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Using pain relief
While it’s only a very temporary solution, if the pain gets too intense – which it does for many of our patients – using non-steroidal anti-inflammatories (NSAIDs) is a powerful and effective way to reduce your symptoms, for a short while anyway. And sometimes, that’s just what you need to take the edge off until you’re able to take more permanent action.
Will These Home Remedies Cure My Plantar Fasciitis?
While all of these treatments are very useful in either supporting your recovery or giving you some temporary relief from your symptoms, it’s important to know that the only way to get rid of your plantar fasciitis pain for good is to directly address whatever caused your plantar fasciitis pain in the first place. And that does mean having your feet assessed to understand what these causes are, as well as the severity of the damage.
This is one of our specialities here at Masterton Foot Clinic, with our podiatrists highly experienced in diagnosing and treating plantar fasciitis, as well as having invested in innovative treatments such as shockwave therapy to get you permanent relief much faster.
Learn more about how we treat plantar fasciitis and what you can expect from your appointment here.