♪ Bob and Brad. ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ physical therapists on the internet. ♪
- Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapists.
- We are the real most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Plantar fascis, (laughs) fasciitis.
Plantar fasciitis, "How To Heal With Massage,"
that's the topic of today. - There you go.
And this is kind of attractive
'cause if you can heal something through a massage
usually massage feels pretty good.
We've got a good thing going here I think.
That's right.
We're going to show you a couple of ways to do that too.
So that plantar fascia, the reason I said plantar fascia
cause that's what is affected.
There is three thick flat bands that form the arch
of your foot.
Now I actually have a pretty high arch,
you can actually see the bands here.
- (Brad) Yeah, you certainly can.
- (Bob) So those bands come from here
and they actually go up
into the toes even
and it's going to be important to know that.
And I'll show you just in a minute.
- (Brad) Are we going to mention it also...
Part of it goes up into the calf.
- (Bob) Right, right,
this is all kind of the posterior chain they call it.
- (Brad) Yup, exactly.
- (Bob) So this attaches to the Achilles tendon
the Achilles tendon attaches to the calf
and the calf comes into the knee.
- (Brad) Right, the soleus, we don't have to get all...
Muscles defined.
- (Bob) Right, so what happens normally is this gets torn.
This fascia gets torn.
- (Brad) So not like it's torn right off the bone.
- No
- Micro tears.
- (Bob) Micro tears. - (Brad) Very painful though.
- (Bob) Painful and there is poor blood supply to this.
So it doesn't heal very well.
And you know, it gets inflamed.
So that's the itis
- (Brad) Right?
- (Bob) So its plantar, fasciitis.
- (Brad) So inflammation of the plantar fascia.
- Yeah and quite often the pain is right here.
- Um-hm
- It can be anywhere, but quite often I'll see it.
And everybody's sees that it's right there.
- And that's where that fascia connects to the bone.
That's where you get the micro tears.
- Right
- But as the pain, the worst it gets
it seems like it spreads out or refers to other parts.
- Yeah, and also what happens is, you know
that's what is trying to help hold the arch in place.
- So that's why it puts a lot of pressure on that area.
So the first thing we're gonna want you to do is actually
it's not massage, but it's a stretch
before you get out of bed in the morning.
Cause what happens is it heals overnight?
It's starting to heal.
- Yup
- You get up in the morning,
you step on it and you tear it right open again.
- Right?
- So we want to put a little stress on it
stretch it under control.
- Right?
When you wake up in the morning.
So what you're gonna do is just take your hand.
I go right over the toes
and I'm going to pull the foot this way
and the toes this way.
- So dorsiflex the foot
and bring the toe up in that same direction.
So you get that stretch.
See, cause what happens is when you get out of bed
if you don't do this
and you stand all that stretching through your
body weight is going on and very quickly,
it's too much too soon.
We need to gradually get into that weight bearing.
- Right
- And that's kind of the classical sign.
- Right?
- You wake up, you step, it feels pretty good.
Ow, ow, ow, what happened?
- As soon as you put weight on it
and then you start limping and then it gets a little better
as you walk further.
- Usually as the day goes on.
Right.
So what you're gonna want to do is do that stretch
before you get out of bed and then put on some shoes.
- Sure
- So you have some arch support
while you're letting it letting this heal.
- Right
- And you want to also do this when you've
been sitting awhile.
- Um-hm
- So if you've been, let's say
sitting for an hour in a chair.
You want to go ahead and stretch that foot.
- Sure.
- Before you get about
out of the chair and again, slap that shoe back on.
- That's right.
- All right, let's start talking about some massage.
- Oh yes
- You can do a self massage
with your hand and you can just do circles
with your thumbs and you can really press an air.
What generally, what, boy, I've got dirty feet.
- Oh my God.
- Generally, what I recommend is you may not be
able to tolerate them right over that painful spot.
- Right?
- So you'll want to work around that
and you just make circles with your thumbs
and then you can work it into what we call Splain,
where you put your thumbs together and pull apart.
- You can do it with your socks on like I do
but it does work better barefoot.
I thought with my socks on you can see what's going on
cause I got a black surface with my white thumbs
but this is something you really need to get fairly
aggressive with.
Your thumbs are going to get tired.
- Yup
- And that's normal.
And that's good.
- Well, as a second option.
Brad, do you want to take, grab a massager here?
- You bet.
- We got lots of different massage options here
all these massage guns.
And we got kind of a smaller one all the way up to a large,
the most powerful one we have.
- Right
- And they all come with five heads.
This one actually comes to the metal head too.
- Right, you're probably not going to use that on...
- On the foot.
- On the foot however.
- This one would work really well for that.
You want to show how you've been doing this Brad?
- Sure.
Well I don't want to take the time we got the, head-on here.
Let's get this going here.
- Sure
- Now there's five settings
and the key about a massage gun is that it massage
and it has a linear or a back and forth motion.
And that's critical.
You're not going to go on your foot straight in.
- So your not going in like this.
- Right, fairly aggressive.
You want to go at an angle
so that it actually does a cross fiber massage
which has been recommended by Dr. Syriacs.
- You actually may want to take your sock off.
- Oh yeah, that's a good idea.
Eh, there we go there, there we go.
- Right it was recommended by Dr. James Syriacs.
He's passed away probably 30 years
by now, already,
but he was the father of orthopedic medicine,
very effective crossfire massage.
- And so I'm doing that without much less effort.
And it's you get a better job done with this, but I'm still
if I get up to that sore spot
and it's like, oh, that hurts.
Stay away from it.
Work around it.
You know, you can work in here.
You can vary the pressure and use good judgment.
You don't want to have the idea, no pain, no gain.
You know, it should feel like a good massage.
- A good pain.
- Yeah.
- You can bump up against the pain
but don't go into...
- Exactly
Don't go into the pain cave as Kelly Starrett likes to.
- Yeah the pain cave,
I've heard someone call it the hurt box.
- The hurt box. (Bob laughs)
- Yeah. Whoever, you know,
everyone's got throw in a little...
- Now why the massager is nice to have also
in the case of plantar fasciitis
we want you to work what they call upstream also.
Cause you want to make sure you're getting all
the muscles that are affecting the entire foot.
- Right
- And if this muscle is tight, when you walk
this part of the foot is going to take more stress.
- Right
- So these, this, even the hamstrings
Brad should be loose enough
that they're not pullin
and causing tightness and causing increased stress here.
So yeah, you really want to get
up into the calf, worked that out.
You want to, maybe even, like I said,
get into to the hamstring,
this is where this one really shines.
- Yeah.
- I know it's too much for you Brad.
- It is, now when I get into my calf, I use a smaller one.
It doesn't have as much travel
and I tolerate it cause I need to work.
And Bob just brought that up.
I got to work on this more.
- Yeah, if it's tender, you need to work on it.
I mean if you hit it and there's no, no pain at all.
You're probably fine.
- Yeah.
- Like I got certain muscles that are fine
and I got lots of muscles that are not fine, so...
- And this is a, the thing
about a gun is you can use it all
over your body, you know, and you know
other people in your family, you know, we've got Chris
they've got two or three guns in between him and his son
and his wife was using one too.
- Chris, is a pharmacist that we have on the channel
every so often.
- His son's a hockey player.
- Hockey player.
- And Chris is is quite active.
- Oh God yeah, he's, he's one of those...
- He's the nut.
(Brad laughs)
- Not a nut case, just in a nice way.
- All right, Brett I'm now going to show the last one here.
This is an interesting technique again,
done by Kelly Starret
author of Becoming A Supple Leopard.
- We still don't know for sure if it Staret not Starrett.
- I think it's Staret.
- How we pronounce his last name.
- Yeah, we'll find out.
- Yeah. We're gonna talk to him.
- So you can grab,
you put your thumbs right on the Achilles tendon
and you're putting pretty good pressure on it.
And while you're doing that
you're actually flossing the muscle.
- (Brad) So you actively move your ankle up
and down like this.
- (Bob) And where I feel this is right on there.
It really pulls on there.
And that means that bound down a little bit.
- (Brad) Sure
- (Bob) And when you do this, you're going to
find out your motion's going to improve over time.
- (Brad) See now I feel mine more proximal
or more up this way. So I've a...
- (Bob) You've gone up a little higher.
- And I do occasionally when I run,
I get a strain in those things and I need to work that.
Yeah, mine is pulling right here Brad.
- This is a, I really liked this.
You don't need a gun.
You can do it manually.
- Yup
- So you know, you could do this.
I remember I went on a vacation once
and I had this gun and it was so hard to pack.
But now this one's easier to pack,
but if you can have options to do it without
that's a great thing.
- You can, you can certainly work it
with your hand too.
It begins to fatigue after a while, so.
- And, probably the older you get
like my fingers just don't tolerate things.
- Right
- I don't know if I'm becoming a wimp,
or I just don't...
- It's probably gettin a little bit arthritis Brad.
- Bob don't say that.
- I'm sorry.
- Oh, he said it.
- All right.
(Brad sighs)
- Check out this video is a part of a series
of videos on massage.
Check out the entire series at bobandbrad.com.
Go to the program section, look for a massages.
Other ones there, sciatica, plant...
We have one on plantar fasciitis.
That's right does even give them more detail.
- Right
- They got like tens units.
We got one on the hip that I don't know
if it's quite totally loaded yet.
- Shoulder
- Do we have the shoulder yet?
Whatever. You'll see.
- Yeah
- And each section say...
- Each video.
- Yeah. We'll just a section with a number of videos.
- Oh right
- And you go through
and you'll pick out the title that you need to look at.
- Right.
- And then click on it.
You can watch a video.
They're about 10 minutes long and there's a PDF printout
that you can get a review
of the video with exercises on the printout.
That way you don't have to go back
and look at the video.
- There's photos with it.
So, you know, there'll be...
We'll have the same thing for this video.
- Are they color photos?
- Yeah.
- Well really?
- We went all out and by the way
the cost is...
What do we charged Brad?
- Well, this is a big surprise Bob, completely free.
- Zero.
- Not even an email.
There's nobody else out there
that's doing such a generous thing.
That I'm aware of.
- We just want, we want somebody to like us.
So... (Brad laughs)
- Ah, let's see if this works.
- Thanks. (Brad laughs)