How to overcome Plantar Fasciitis and reclaim your mobility

Plantar fasciitis is a pain in the foot, literally the foot. It's a sticking in the inflammation process of the different soft tissue layers in your feet causing a lot of bobbing, your foot pain and towards your heel pain. I've heard of some cases taking up to a year to get rid of and some people always still have it around. But that's because the approach that most people take to correct these things isn't totally the best thing to do. So I want you to stay tuned. We're going to talk about the best way to look at how to train and treat your plantar fasciitis. Greetings. I'm Akeem Masseau, I'm the owner of soulcore Fitness, it's a therapy and fitness company. I've been in this field for almost 30 years and I'm a SOMA therapist and soma trainer which if you haven't heard, it's kind of like a physical therapist but much more detailed. And it's underneath the osteopathic discipline of which I've been studying for quite a while now. I've had quite a a bit of success treating plantar fasciitis. It's because I took a holistic method on it to where prior to that people took a allopathic symptom related type treatment or excess protocol and that's not the best. So I'm going to talk about the holistic approach and that's what I talk about on this channel is a holistic approach and etiology. The cause. I want to treat the cause, not the symptom. So if you want to hear more about this holistic approach cause based system, then subscribe to the channel. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up and don't forget to share with your friends. As I said at the beginning, plantar fasciitis a inflammation process in your layers of soft tissue and fascia and feet and a lack of sliding process, they get stuck because of this, you get pain. So I don't have flow like I'm pinching a tube, then that pressure builds and if I have my tissue which should slide upon each other, they should slide, become stuck, but I try and move. That also develops more inflammation process. This inflammation, like all inflammation, leads to pain and this is especially damaging to plantar fasciitis because you got to walk. So whenever you walk you keep pissing it off and keep keeping it worse. These layers of soft tissue I keep talking about are a lot in your feet. So at your feet you have three Layers of fascia, your feet, as you can see with these pictures, I'm going to be putting up, you have a top layer that goes left to right or right to left. You have a bottom part which goes front to back. You have a middle layer which goes front to back, but also a bunch of different directions. These three layers should slide upon each other. They should move all soft tissue. And if you eviscerate, your organs should slide on a watery substance, fascia liquid. So it should move. It should be even. The problem is when it gets stuck, and that's where plantar fasciitis comes in. These three layers of fascia attach, though, to the back of your leg, namely your Achilles tendon. Your Achilles tendon also has a bunch of different layers. The two main layers we're going to talk about today are the layer to your soleus and your gastrocalves, but not the muscles, the fascia that surrounds these muscles, because it's the fascia that surrounds these muscles that connect to the plantar fascia and then connect up to your hamstrings, namely your biceps femoris, which is your outside hamstring. Again, the fascia of the bicep. And then that goes up to your ischu turaci, your butt, which goes up to your back, up to your head, out to your arms. So this is what I'm talking about, a holistic approach. It's not just a plantar. Sure, you have pain in the plantar, but where in that chain do you also have issues that can be contributing to a plantar? So you don't have to be a genius to understand that Plantar fasciitis is a lack of sliding on the soft tissue and lack of flow. You need to restore the sliding process and restore the flow. So, sliding process, obviously you need those different layers of fascia and muscle to slide upon each other. When I say decrease of flow, I'm mainly talking about the flow of liquid through your fascia. Your fascia has little collagen tubes, little things that go through it. It's not inert. It's a living tissue. It's very, very important. It's a big focus on how I work with people. So you have to increase that flow within that tube, because that flow brings nutrients to that area, takes away waste, and helps keep everything nice and smooth. Current techniques to treat plantar fasciitis are grasting technique or aggressive technique. Like that. Some sort of myofascial release, either with a ball or a roller or by hand. Heat and stem Strengthening or stretching, what else is there? I think I'm missing something. But these techniques kind of fall short because mainly they're not addressing the body holistically. They're focusing on just the symptom, just the foot, just what's happening. That's not how the body works. The body is interdependent, interconnected. And part of the reason people have pathologies is because your body's lost the ability to do this. So if you go to try and find treatment for your plantar fasciitis and that person wants to do Graston technique, run the other way. I wouldn't wish Graston on my worst enemy. I would never ever do to my body. It is way too traumatic to the body. Graston is a medieval looking piece of metal that they push into a tissue and scrape it up and down like they try and peel paint off the wall. I'm not quite sure why they do that, but it gives you the opposite effect of what you want. If the goal is, is to increase the sliding process and the flow of liquid through these fascial collagen tubes will then push in a piece of metal that smushes the tissue down and crushes the tubes is the exact opposite thing you want to do. My most current case of plantar fasciitis, she did that first at a physiotherapist. That made things 100 times worse. It wasn't until we took this holistic approach that she got better. Now if you go do myofascial release, it's not as aggressive, but it's very similar to the outcomes you get from grassing. Just not as traumatic, especially if you're using some sort of tool. So I see people roll their foot on like a ball, a little ball with pokey things on it or on top of a roller. They're doing that because they're trying to treat the symptom, which is the pain in their foot. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. I don't know. Sometimes if people feel relief, that's great, but it's not going to correct anything because again, you didn't increase the flow, you didn't increase the sliding process and you traumatized the tissue. Heat and stim heat. I mean, I guess it's okay. It brings some liquid, some heat to the area, but it doesn't work with the sliding process. It doesn't work holistically. Kind of a waste of time for me. And cold icing should only be done for the first 12 to 24 hours of having an injury, never afterwards, because cold stops the inflammation process, which will make you feel no pain because you are nice. But then it stops the good inflammation. Inflammation is your first line of defense to heal your body or to correct some sort of virus. And if I'm stopping that process, then I'm stopping the process of healing. There's other forms like acupuncture, which I'm not acupuncturist. I don't know the techniques, but in terms of like increasing flow and energy through the body, sounds fantastic. Sounds like something you should do, but you need to do it with an exercise protocol and treatment protocol to help increase the chain that I keep talking about. Have you had or have plantar fasciitis? What treatments have you tried? Have they worked? Have they not worked? I love to know. Put them in the comments and then stay tuned for how I approach plantation plantar fasciitis. So how have I found success working with plantar fasciitis? I'm going to tell you here in a little bit, but I'm going to give you a little asterisk here. First and foremost, this is not a prescriptive thing for you to follow at all. This is not me showing you a bunch of exercises and things to do and then you go home and follow them because you're not just you. However many people are watching this video and each person has a different body, which each person would need to be a address. Specifically two. Each one of these things I'm going to go through needs to be taught with factors of progression. When you exercise, you're retraining the body. You retrain the body because the soft tissue always wins. And so you want to tell it to do something different. Well, each person needs to be taught a little bit differently on how to do each one because each person has different areas that are smart and not smart to be general. So I can just give you an outline to follow. Sorry, but not really. Sorry. So the first thing I do with people is I give them exercises. I give them holistic exercises. I give them holistic stretches, which is called myofascial stretching. Myofascial stretching is stretching not just the muscle but the fascia and the fascia which connects the whole body. I first give them the soleus and the gastroc because as you remember at the beginning of this video I talked about how the soleus muscle. Soleus and your gastroc, your calf muscles are part of your Achilles tendon which go down into your foot, which connect to those three layers of Plantar fasciitis. So when I give them these stretches, most people just by these two stretches get, I don't know, 50, 60, 70% relief just from these two stretches. But I don't stop there because, again, I'm dressing the body holistically and because it was gastroc and so don't stop at your knee. They attach the back of your thigh to your hamstrings, namely your bicep femoris. So I give them a myofascial stretch for the bicep femoris. Usually it's pretty good, but because that chain goes up to the head and out to the arm, I mainly give them stretches for their glute max, deep and superficial, for the latissimus dorsi, for the transverse spinalis. All that can be part of your chain for your plantar fasciitis, as they're doing that, because that's the most important part, is to always do homework to retrain the body. I also give them therapy. Therapy includes, like I said at the beginning, working with those three layers of fascia in your feet. That's the most important part. I want to unstick and increase the flow of those three layers of fascia. It feels really good when you get it done right. I work those three layers, and I can tell once those released, boom. But now I work up the body. I want to work with that fascia of your lower leg, which is namely your fascia curies up to your leg, your thigh fascia, maybe even your IT band all the way up to your body. By doing these general protocols, I get a lot of success. But there's some things that derail that success. I want you to listen. So when somebody comes in to me and they have plantar fasciitis, the first thing I say to them, and the pun is definitely intended here, is that you're going to literally take two steps forward and one steps back. And in terms of your progress, because after I give you that treatment I just talked about and I give you the exercises, as soon as you step off the table or start to leave my studio, you're ruining the progress because you're stepping on the ground and you're decreasing all that flow and movement that I talked about, you got to walk around. So it's not like you can float, but that's going to set you back. Being overweight is literally going to, again, excuse the pun, crush the fascia because now you have excess weight that's pushing harder down in your feet that even just standing or Moving around, you're putting more pressure, putting more, pushing the tissue more together, crushing the tubes more. The footwear people wear really screws up plantar fasciitis and the big shoes people wear. Now. These big hoka looking things actually aren't good for correcting plantar fasciitis. If you got to wear them because if you have to wear them because your feet hurt, then you've got to wear them. But if the goal is to increase that movement and increase that flow, then putting a gigantic padding where nothing moves is not going to help it. Again, if you got to do it because you have pain, do it. But you need to find a way to let your feet move your feet, all those joints and ligaments and muscle in your feet should move and have a job. The more I take myself away from being barefoot, I the less my feet do their job. So you need to find some way to slowly let your feet move. More therapy and exercise help, but you also have to do some good movement patterns. Having bad movement patterns also, like I said, increases plantar fasciitis because your body doesn't move well, having bad posture and having not a lot of muscle. So as I said before, to stretch a muscle, you need a muscle. And so especially with like an ectomorph or anybody who doesn't have muscle tissue in these areas, you need to work. You need to also do some strengthening. But don't just jump in and start doing calf raises like I said. Well, I don't know if I said it, but your calf, I didn't say it. Your calf splits in two. This is a big thing here. Your calf splits in two to go do a different direction, it bifurcates. So when you see these calf stretching of keeping the foot in one position that's not correct in it needs to turn out toward the inside calf or turn in toward the outside calf. The soleus is straight, so you can see you have three different directions. You need to move your foot to work three different muscles. Then you work your upper body wherever you need muscle. Your bicep, femoris, your lat, doesn't matter. You need to have that muscle so you can properly stretch it. This is how you want to approach the body. Not just with plantar fasciitis, with anything, right? And not just for pathologies. Even if you're just looking to strengthen your body better and get more mobile, you have to take this approach because the exercises and things you do for your body keep you functioning. If it keeps you functioning, it means it keeps you away from dysfunction which is pain and mobility, but it also can take you further into higher functioning exact same exercises. So all this exercise I told you for plantar fasciitis will take you away from plantar fasciitis but also towards a really functioning plantar fasciitis calf hamstring function. You get stronger, get more mobile as you keep doing the exact same exercises. So if you like what you heard, if you want to hear more, I got some options for you. I've got a free facebook group. So in the description below I put a link to my free facebook group and it's a more interactive group to where I talk about masterclasses and I do interactive challenges where I I show you things too and I do mini trainings and just interaction in the group. So just click on a link, answer some questions, agree to the terms you're in. If you want to participate in that then you can have a free ebook. It's on how to get mobile, get less pain and live the life of your dreams. Four steps again in the description, click on it, put your name and information there, you get instant access. Or if you're ready to talk more about how this broken can help you, then use the link in the description to schedule a time to book with me. We can talk about what you're doing, what's your sticking points and how it can help. And I'll only bring up my services if I feel you're a good fit. No other time. So please, if you like this video please share with your friends. Please give it a thumbs up that tells the algorithm hey this is good and then more people who like it will see it. Please don't forget to subscribe and then I'll see you next week. Take care.