- Hi, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- Together we are the most famous physical therapists
on the internet.
- In our opinion of course, Bob.
- Isn't that a surprise, Brad.
Okay, today we're gonna talk about calf pain or calf strain.
This is an injury that you may have incurred
from like tennis or from running uphill
or any sport where you're doing a lot
of accelerating and decelerating.
They actually call it tennis legs sometimes, Brad,
because it's so common.
- Oh sure.
- A lot of people refer to the calf muscles
as kind of the motor of the, of running
because it really provides a lot of the,
the engine support?
- Right. It's, uh, a connection
to the ground forces you up way.
- Now this is a very common injury
very common injury among weekend athletes.
And this is the best treatment you can do for it.
Believe me, we're physical therapists.
This is the best thing you can do
especially this is a good one
for one that's been kind of nagging and still
- Right.
- And just won't go away.
You've been maybe even already resting.
And it just, it just keeps coming back.
Because what happens is right
after the injury there's scar tissue being laid down
and that scar tissue is, is kind of forming almost a web.
That's what you called it, right Brad?
- Right? It's not in orderly fashion.
- Yeah it's not in orderly fashion and because
it's this way, it's not very strong.
So you gotta have it heal strong
and by doing this type of massage, this particular
cross fiber friction massage,
developed by Cyriax, this will help strengthen it.
So believe it or not, this should go away within 2 weeks.
If it's chronic, maybe 4 weeks at the,
- Sure.
- at the utmost.
So right after you injure your calf,
let's say you just injured it,
I would say go ahead and do the PRICE:
Protection, Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation.
- Right.
- But within a day or two,
I'd go ahead and start doing this massage.
- If it's too tender, wait.
- Right, and we'll, we'll go over that. We'll go over it.
- Sure.
- So, okay.
What you're gonna do if you have somebody to help you,
great, if not, you're gonna do it yourself.
Just roll up your pant leg.
This is my involved leg, we'll say
all right, we're gonna go ahead
and sit kind of in a cross leg fashion here.
And generally the injury happens
on what we call the medial gastrocnemius
which is on the uh, inside part of your calf,
you know, near the other side.
- [Brad] Right.
- [Bob] And it's so it's right up in here.
You'll find it.
It's gonna be the tender spot, right?
- [Brad] Right.
- [Bob] It's right in the belly here.
And what you're gonna want to do is you
can take your two thumbs and it's actually better
if you can actually took your fingers like this
- [Brad] Right.
- [Bob] or have somebody do it, and you're
gonna find the spot and you're gonna rub real deep
back and forth like this.
Now, if you start doing this and it just gets worse
and worse and worse, just tender, tender, tender.
I'd back off, go ahead and ice
for another day or two and then try it again.
- [Brad] Sure.
- [Bob] But if it's, if it starts feeling
like it actually starts to get a little bit numb
after a while, let's say
I'm doing the two thumb technique now
I'm going real deep.
I'm not just moving the skin.
I'm going deep down
- [Brad] Right.
- [Bob] and I'm breaking up that scar tissue
so that it can heal strong now.
And let's say I do this for like a minute
and it actually starts to almost feel numb.
That's a good sign.
- [Brad] Right.
- [Bob] That means you're doing the right thing.
So again, you can do the three fingers
but I'm going across the muscle.
The muscle fibers run this way
[Brad] Right.
you're gonna go across the fibers like this and Brad,
believe it or not, as a therapist
you could do this for 20 minutes.
- [Brad] Right!
- [Bob] That's how much Cyriax would recommend.
I wouldn't recommend doing that to start off with
I would maybe just do five and the first time you do it
you can do it three days in a row if you want,
but then after that I would do it every other day.
- [Brad] It's gonna be getting better
if it's the right thing.
- [Bob] If it's the right thing.
And again, if it's probably an acute injury
meaning it just recently happened,
this should be, you might be back
on the tennis court in 2 weeks.
If it's chronic, it may take you 4 weeks to, to, to
you know, work in this every other day and
and doing the 5 to 10 minutes.
Maybe even more, if you can tolerate it.
I don't know, your hands probably
won't hold up that long.
- Right, five minutes and your fingers
and my knuckles are pretty darn sore.
- But you're gonna be surprised
how well this works in most people.
- Right.
- And make sure that's of course what the injury is,
is that it, 'cause generally what you've done is
you've torn a few of the fibers of the gastrocnemius.
If you've really tore it
to the point where it needs surgery
you won't even be able to, you know,
- It's going to be tender. Very tender.
- It's going to really be bad.
- So do we stretch a little bit with this, Bob?
- We're going to show you what to do after.
We're gonna do the top three exercises
you should do after the pain is gone away.
One thing as a, a recommendation, when you
before you start doing this and let's say
you're having trouble getting around.
Do you wanna hand me that paper towel, Brad?
- Sure.
- One thing you wanna do
to take a little bit of stress off the calf
is to actually put a wedge in your heel
and you can buy one of those Spenco?
Is it Spenco?
- Right. Spenco heel.
- heel wedges.
- Yeah. And, and you can put 'em in there
or you can just make your own, you just take,
I took three paper towels here,
I folded them up and you can see how this
creates a little bit of a, a heel height, a heel wedge
- Lift. I call it heel lift.
- Heel lift. There we go.
I'm coming up with the term yet.
All right.
You just put your shoe, take your shoe off,
you put it in the heel of the shoe
and you can slide your foot in
and that's gonna raise your heel up a little bit
so there's not as much stress on the calf
while you're going through this,
this phase of trying to get it to heal stronger.
So the, that'll give you a bit
of little relief until you can take the pain away.
- Right.
- Right? These are real comfortable, Brad.
- Oh yeah. I, I believe you, Bob.
- I'm gonna put Spenco out of business.
I'm gonna go ahead and get the Schrupp heel wedge, lift.
- Yeah. It's amazing what you can do
without spending any money and get good results.
- Yep. All right, if you haven't already,
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- Yep. All the way up in there.
- 52. Wow.
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- I have trouble even believe he is alive yet.
- Yeah. It's uh, I'm still there though.
- All right, good luck to you though.