♪ Bob and Brad ♪
♪ The two most famous ♪
♪ Physical therapists ♪
♪ On the internet ♪
- Hey.
Hi. - You ready to go to work?
Hi folks, I'm Bob Schrupp, physical therapist.
- Brad Heineck, physical therapist.
- The most famous physical therapists on the internet.
- In our opinion, of course, Bob.
- Today we're gonna show you the single best stretch
for plantar fasciitis, bone spurs, and heel pain.
It's all the same thing, in many cases.
- It all is.
- Yeah, they're not separate,
they're all part of the same foot.
- Generally, it's the same problem, even.
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Because what are we giving away right now?
We're still giving away the Kebado, right?
The back support. - The back.
The back support, nice memory foam one.
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but it's all taken care of now,
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It's on there, giveaways.
- Sure.
- All right, so, what is plantar fasciitis?
Let's start off with that first.
- Foot pain, man!
It wakes you up when you put your weight on your foot
in the morning, out of bed.
- I've got a picture here, Brad, actually.
- Oh good.
- Maybe it will help out.
- So, this has gotta, focus in on this.
So, the plantar fascia.
How're we doing, Liz?
- So, this is a picture of the bottom of the foot
with the skin taken off, so you can see what's underneath.
- Right, soft tissue taken off.
And the plantar fascia is a really tough, fibrous material.
It's the white stuff on this one.
- Yep, right here.
- And it attaches into the heel and it goes all the way up.
What I wanna show here, though,
it goes right up and into the toes.
- [Brad] Right.
So when you wanna stretch this plantar fascia,
you wanna make sure you're stretching the toes too.
But it also attaches kinda into the heel,
which goes all the way up into the calf, even.
- [Brad] Right.
- It's all kinda one unit.
You have to think of it that way.
- Right, from the knee, wraps around the heel,
all the way to the toes.
You gotta put it all together.
- So, let's talk a little bit about bone spurs though, Brad,
so while we're on the same topic here.
'Cause a lot of times people what'll happen,
they'll have some heel pain, and the heel pain
that generally people have with plantar fasciitis
is right in this spot here.
- [Brad] You bet, yep. - Right in the arch.
- You could almost put an x right there.
That's the x marks the spot.
And so, quite often you're gonna have heel pain
and then what's gonna happen,
they might do some x-rays,
or maybe they did x-rays for some other reason,
and they see the bone spurs.
- Ah. - And they go a-ha!
It's the bone spurs.
- Yeah, it's coming off the end of the calcaneus.
- I don't know if you can see this or not.
Let's go from the side here.
- [Brad] There we go.
- So, I try to create a bone spur here.
- [Brad] Mhm, right there. - You see that?
And that occurs over time.
You got that band here, the fascia.
It's pulling on the bone.
It actually pulls the calcium out,
and creates almost an artificial bone here.
But the thing is, this usually is not giving you any pain.
- [Brad] Right.
They've done studies where you take people
and their old pain in their feet,
and there's a number of people who have bone spurs
with no pain.
But, if you take x-rays and people say they got a bone spur,
psychologically, it gets you worried and you think,
oh, I got this bone spur, I better get it removed,
when in fact, like you had just said,
now they're not removing them like they used to.
- No, they used to surgically remove 'em quite often
and now it's rare.
- Sure.
- It's a rare event.
And, 50% of the people with plantar fasciitis
have bone spurs.
- Sure.
So, in other words, it probably isn't be caused by that,
it's caused by the plantar fasciitis.
And the problem with the plantar fascia,
that tough fibrous material,
is you can get micro-tears in it,
and then, it starts to heal,
and that's why you wake up in the morning,
and it doesn't hurt as bad,
and also you step on it, and it's like ow, oh, oh.
- It stretches it, you know.
- It stretches it, and you're actually maybe re-tearing it.
- Sure.
So it's like picking the scab off of that wound,
and it continues to irritate it,
really lengthen the amount of time.
- Yeah, it really keeps going through that cycle.
- Sure. - So what we want you to do,
the treatment that we want you to do,
there's a lot of things you could do,
but if you wanna pick the one-best-stretch for it,
you're gonna wanna actually stretch
the heel chord.
- Yep.
- And also the toes, and you can do it at the same time.
You can actually grab on.
So, you're in bed, before you get out of bed in the morning,
you can grab here with your palm,
and I'm pullin' the toes, up, this direction,
but I'm also pullin' the whole foot, this way.
So I'm stretchin' the heel chord, the Gastroc Soleus.
- [Brad] Right.
- [Bob] Then the whole complex here, at the same time.
Just givin' it a good pressure-on, pressure-off,
or you can just give it a continuous stretch.
- You're gonna have to go off
to a little bit slowly in the morning.
You're probably just not gonna give it a good stretch,
because that's gonna be uncomfortable.
So, plan on takin' a little bit of time with this.
- Gradually work your way into it.
Now, the same is true when you're at your desk,
and you've been sitting for awhile.
Same thing, it starts to tighten up.
You can take your shoe off and go ahead
and give it a little stretch,
before you get up and start walkin' around.
- Sure.
- The other thing is you should be wearing your shoes
all the time now, when you have this problem.
Don't walk around bare-feet at all.
- Yeah, because that stresses it.
- That stresses it even more.
- Right.
- So we do have another alternative here.
That's the way you can do it manually.
There is a ProStretch Plus.
They've been sellin' this type of stretcher
for years, without this little addition here.
But this has really made a big difference,
in our opinion of this device, right?
- Their old ones I've always liked 'em,
but this one, they've really put some addition.
You see the toe stretch,
and it just works better overall, to me.
I like it.
- Yeah this, if you're an athlete or a runner,
or even a walker,
- Right. - This is a bad thing to get
to prevent plantar fascia.
- Sure.
(stutters) Plantar fascias, plantar fasciitis
(both laugh)
from happening.
And also - Oh, Bob.
- Yeah, there I go.
I need that speech therapist.
But the other thing is,
just to stretch the calf muscles too.
- Oh, right, yeah.
- What's nice about this, these remove.
So you may wanna start off with these not in place.
Put the one in place
and just start with the heel one.
And, you can do this actually in a seated position,
but, a lot of people probably do it standing.
- Right - Right.
- Brad's showing the standing the method there,
and you can just really, give her a good stretch.
Sometimes you need somethin' to hold onto.
- It's nice and smooth, you know.
It's got that cam configuration,
so you really get some nice force on it
without a lot of pressure.
It's just so nice and smooth.
- [Bob] Yeah, and you're stretching the arch there too.
That's because of that gap there,
you're really doing a good job of stretching your arch.
So then you can go ahead and add this piece in,
depending on how long your shoe is,
or your foot is,
and Brad was walkin' around with this thing on before.
But now look at this.
You can see how well it's stretching my toes.
And it's stretching the heel,
I mean the arch, and it's stretching the heel.
So it's gettin' everything all at once.
- [Brad] I'm gonna get mine in there, Bob.
- [Bob] Brad's gonna get in there.
- [Brad] Ooh, there we go.
You see, I've got that adjusted,
and it's nice 'cause there's a number of adjustments.
You can get it custom for your foot.
There we go.
- And this is a stretch I do quite often,
so I was able to go right to the toe piece right away.
- Sure.
- But just really, as a runner and even a biker,
this is just giving me an excellent stretch.
I'm afraid it's taking over your slant board, Brad.
- (sighs) I still like the slant board,
but this toe, it just is nice.
- Yeah, it does, it's a different component.
My son, by the way, uses that slant board,
the one that you made?
- Yeah.
- At work.
He has his standing desk. - Oh really?
- Yeah, he goes, I like it.
I stretch my calf
every so often. (Brad laughs)
- Yeah.
Slant board, incline board,
that really stretches this,
but this component here that adds that toe extension,
really completes this in a nice way,
just for the reason we talked about.
- And then, yeah, if you wanna get goofy,
you put two of 'em on and you walk around.
No, we don't recommend it.
- No, Bob.
We're not gonna do that. (Bob laughs)
Safety first.
- Yeah, safety first, remember.
All right everybody.
Thanks for watchin' us.
Remember, we can fix just about anything.
- Except for...
- A broken heart.
- There you go, Bob.
But we're workin' on that too.
- Yes we are.
- I don't think this is gonna help though.
- No, I don't think so.
(Brad laughs)
- Thanks.