Back to work, back to play. Hey, Dr. Noah Volz here to give you some evidence-based exercises
to heal tarsal tunnel syndrome quickly. So these five exercises are great, uh I'll go ahead and
show you what tarsal tunnel syndrome is, and then we'll jump into those exercises so that you can
really, uh, do it yourself, and um, get the, the best results with your care. So now I'm going
to go ahead and point out where you may feel pain if you have tarsal tunnel syndrome. So oftentimes
pain is experienced right through here, so, kind of right between the inner ankle and the heel,
right in this area here, and it usually kind of goes down into the sole of the foot. Uh, another
way you can tell if this is a true tarsal tunnel syndrome is by actually moving the foot in,
so kind of bringing the heel in, the ankle in, and that will often compress this area right here,
and that can bring on some of the, the symptoms of tarsal tunnel syndrome. So if you have those, then
it's that's an indication that these exercises that we're going through are going to be really
beneficial. So we'll go ahead and go through those now. So our first exercise is the standing
calf stretch, and this actually works more on the gastrocnemius, which is one part of the calf. So
this is going to be our stability foot, and then this is going to be the foot that we're actually
stretching. So she'll go ahead and bring the foot back, so she's on to the ball of the foot here,
and then she's gonna lower the heel down on a count of seven, bringing the heel down as low
as possible, and then, once she gets to the bottom there, she's gonna take a moment and
just kind of relax, and then contract the calf as much as possible, and then see if she can
lower a little bit more, and then contract the calf again, and lower. We'll do three of those
contract-relax cycles, go ahead and bring the heel back up, and come out of the exercise. And so,
we want to do three of those contract-relax cycles and then also do uh, three reps on that one side,
and then we would switch to the other side. So that's the standing calf stretch exercise,
that's our first exercise in the tarsal tunnel syndrome exercise series. All right, so our second
exercise is similar to the first exercise, it's a standing calf stretch but this time we're focused
on the soleus. And so in order to get the soleus muscle of the calf, we need to keep the knee bent,
so that makes it a little bit more complicated. So go ahead and step your foot back, again, keep this
knee bent, you'll also have to bend the other knee quite a bit in order to do that, and then
just like the last one lowering the heel down on a count of seven, and then we get to the bottom,
engage the calf a little bit, good, and then lower it again, and then engaging the calf a little bit,
and then lowering again. Good. So we'll do that contract-relax cycle, again, three times in a row,
and then after that third one you can go ahead and come all the way up, and we'll do three sets
of those on each side, and then you can do that up to two times a day. So that's the second exercise,
that's the standing soleus calf stretch, that's our second exercise for the tibial
tendon dysfunction exercise series. Okay, so our third exercise we're calling the resisted sole
to sky exercise, and so what that means is that the sole of the foot is going to lift up towards
the sole of the sky. So we've already set that up here, we have our band or CLX band and it's
stretching down onto the opposite foot that's on the floor, the legs are crossed in this figure
four position, and so the actual exercise is the resistance is pulling the foot down,
and then we're going to bring the foot up, bringing the sole of the foot towards the sky,
and then we-it'll naturally pull the foot back down, and then, we're gonna lift the foot up,
bringing the sole of the foot up towards the sky. So we're gonna do that ten times on the side
that's being affected, and we're gonna do three sets of ten reps, just pulling the foot up towards
the sky. Uh, you know, you can vary the resistance of the band, either doubling up on the CX band,
or getting a band that has more resistance, depending on how challenging this is, so this
is our third exercise in the series. So our next exercise is the posterior tibial nerve floss,
and in this exercise we have the tension here on the foot, it's pulling the toes back towards the
ankle, it's kind of drawing the whole foot back towards the ankle, and then we're going to go
ahead and bring the knee up here as we pull on the toes, and this is really gentle, but you'll
want to feel a little stretch right through the posterior tibial tarsal tunnel here. So go ahead
and bring the foot back down, and you'll just keep doing that exercise bringing the knee up, the foot
up off the table or off the floor as you pull here. And we're going to do, uh, ten reps of this
and do three sets. Naturally, it's always good to do these exercises on both sides but you really
only need to do them on the one side where you're actually having this discomfort. Just for symmetry
sake it's good, oftentimes we have compensations on the other side. So that is the posterior tibial
nerve floss. All right so our last exercise is the ankle alphabet. And so, this is pretty simple,
you can do upper case or lower case letters, whatever you decide, and so we'll go ahead and
start and we'll just have, uh Laura move through these different letters of the alphabet. And as
you can see, she's, you know, using her ankle as much as possible to really articulate all of these
different letters. Everybody who does this, it's going to look a little bit different. You want
to go all the way through the alphabet with your ankle, really noticing all of the different places
in the ankle, and this will strengthen the ankle and will help you to feel a lot better. So this is
the last of the exercises in the series. Thank you so much for watching. All right so we just went
through those five exercises for tarsal tunnel syndrome, and after doing these exercises the
first time, uh, you can expect to get some relief, uh if you do these exercises for longer than seven
days and you're not having any effect at all or it's making things worse, it's time to stop the
exercises and go see your healthcare professional and figure out what is going on. If you're coming
here to the office of ProActive we're happy to go ahead and assess you at one of our normal visits,
if you're not currently a patient here and you're having some foot pain, feel free to set up one
of our 15 minute free consultations, we're happy to take a look at things, or if you're doing the
exercises and are not quite sure if you're doing them right, we're also happy to watch you do them,
give you some modifications, either make it more complicated or less complicated, depending
on, uh, what we see and using our expertise. So thank you so much for watching this video,
exercise is a great way to be proactive about your health, and to keep yourself out of the
doctor's office, including ours. Thanks again. Subscribe ProActive Chiropractic.