How I HEALED My ACHILLES Pain (No Surgery)

The reason we have it in the first place is because we stopped playing. If it's not actually broken, then it's a warning light. But if it can function and it just hurts, then you're getting a warning signal of, hey, you need to do something about this area. We're learning how to do something about it. Achilles pain and plantar fascia pain are really annoying. I had them for a long time. I had 10 years of insertional Achilles pain where I didn't really run much or jump much. I know what it's like to have the mid-Achilles sensitivity and, uh, bottom of the foot where you wake up in the morning and you feel really bad. I've been able to move beyond that where I'm not not limited at all with this at the moment. I would still say that I'm rebuilding quality of tissue in this area, but I'm not experiencing day-to-day pain. I can do the things that I want to do— playing soccer, playing tennis, jumping, skipping— and I'd like to help you to be able to do the same. A few of the key things that helped me to move beyond these things, uh, one of them is the toes and toe strength specifically. There's lots of people talking about the feet now with the, the Foot Collective and Chong Ji's stuff and, you know, the barefoot sprinter, and there's lots of good things out there. But I think the thing that isn't being emphasized enough that's most important is actually being able to stand up onto the toes. So you can see there, I can press from the ball of foot onto the toes, and 99.99% of athletes can't do that. It's very uncommon to be able to stand on the toes these days. I've tested lots of people with it. So the toes can be much stronger, and they should be much stronger. So there, think of them as the fourth extension. So we've got hip, knee, ankle extension, and we've got toe extension. And it's not that they're going to contribute as much force as the hips, but the forces sum. And so they're the crack of the whip, they're the end of the, like, the, the fist when we punch or when we throw. The forces are summed through the body into that end part. And so there's an opportunity there to have an exponential increasing effect. Getting really strong into the toes is something that most people haven't worked on, and that I think is the, the key to all of this. How do you get to being able to do that if you can't yet do it? Stand on one foot on the ball of the foot and then use assistance to be able to get reps onto the toes on the other foot. That's a simple way to do it. You can also do it in seated. You can do— just sit down and just raise onto your toes. You can put weight on your knees. There's— it's quite simple to think about how to put a little bit of load into this movement. You can also hold on to something. Most people can do it once you push down, maybe just a few kilograms away from being able to hold the whole body weight, or maybe it's a lot. If you're getting pain with it, take it really slowly. It will adapt. So all the other foot stuff is good balancing. I really love the pipes. I really love the slant boards. All the tools are great, the pipe is great for plantar fascia issues as well, and bringing up the Achilles. Yeah, we wanna build the skill component of it, but there's also that myofascial release and the strengthening that goes on, the mobilization of the joints in the foot, lots of different benefits to the pipe as one of the tools that we can use to improve the feet. Also the slant, down the slant stuff initially is gonna be your friend. We work on 1-minute holds, so 1 minute in each of the directions, And then when you can do it with 2 feet on the board with the heels down, then you go to heels up, 1 minute in each direction. And then you go to 1 foot with the heel down for a minute, and then 1 foot with the heel up for a minute is what I'm working on at the moment. But those, those 4 directions are gonna be really powerful. Initially, focus mostly on down the board, 'cause that's gonna give you more short-range stimulus, which is gonna be good for pain relief, muscle activation, strength, and bringing circulation and life to the area without stretch. This is sort of our, our foundation work, working on the toes and then working on the slant. The other big thing is that we have to bounce. I'm a huge fan of what Poliquin did and was talking about— well, he didn't really talk about it— with the short to long range. You could see it in his programs and his exercise selection, the exercises that he loved. He valued long-range training, he valued short-range training. We took that a step further, ATG and then range of strength, pushing the, the concept of short and long range movements for their different adaptations. That's been understood by the coaches who bought into that. There's a whole video about it, it's one of my most viewed videos and most, you know, you read the comments, people are commenting that it's life-changing and really glad that they got to understand this key information about range training for strength, but it hasn't been applied yet to plyometrics, to bouncing, to elastic work. You can see it in the work of Marinović. Marinović was one of the key innovators in elastic training, and he emphasized high heels with his jumping rope and jumping hurdles, and his athletes did a lot of jumping. They started with doing it on something like this, the SuperCat device, which allows you to go really light. That's one of the benefits. So we need to bounce, and I hear you saying, yeah, I'd love to be bouncing, but bouncing hurts. We've got to find the level that we can bounce at. So the SuperCat is the solution to that. Most people don't have a SuperCat, But we just need to use the concept of the super cat, which means how can we regress back to 5 kilo bilateral jumps, 10 kilo bilateral jumps, jumping high heels. And this is, this is my bounce. Now I can progress it to this very— it's very close to this. It's close to being able to jump and skip, but we only need to be getting some tendon stimulus. So we're thinking about this as a bouncing stimulus. We're thinking about it not as muscles doing the work, but the tendon will do all the work, that it's all the the white tissues. You can hold on to something, you can fully lean on something, you can make it lighter and lighter. The lighter you make it, you can actually get up onto the toes then and do it as well. So if we're up on the toes, it becomes very short range because there's no stretch. It's, it's less and less stress on the tendon. There's going to be a point where you can enter, and that's, that's the main goal with this, is to find a point of something. I want you to find a point of something that you can do every day. Reverse our knee pain, we're pulling the sleds every day. We want to find a level that you can do every day, because if you're doing something that's too much that you need to rest from it, it's easy to not continue the habit of the, of the training and lose momentum. So we want to find the level that we can do every day of the bounce. So what does that look like inside a dance? You would be doing this for intervals on the minute. You might start with doing 2 minutes straight, and then you might get to 5 minutes straight. By the time you can do 5 minutes straight of this higher position, you're probably going to find that you've got a significant change in the— what your sensation that you're feeling. I don't even like to call it pain. It's just a signal from the body. If it's not actually broken, then it's a warning light. If it's physically broken and you can't function with it, then yeah, it's broken. But if it can function and it just hurts, then you're getting a warning signal of, hey, you need to do something about this area. So we're learning how to do something about it. Another variation variation of this, which is also very good, very powerful, is to do this in a seated manner. So you would sit on the bench or chair or whatever, put your foot on the ground, and put a weight on your, on your knee, and then do the same thing. This is a way to kind of take the load even lighter. So if you can't do the standing variation, I would recommend the seated variation. And again, working up to being able to do 5 minutes continuously is, is the target. So we need bounce stimulus. We want to get the plantaris, the muscle on the bottom of the foot. Another way to think about this is like the toes are the shock absorber for the Achilles. The toes and the Achilles are the shock absorber for the knee. The knees, ankles, and toes are shock absorbers for the hips and the lower back. A lot of people get really strong hips and knees, but they haven't developed their ankles, ankle ability and toe ability enough to be able to handle that. And I was definitely one of those people. Traditional way of strength training, it's designed for athletes who are running athletes, they're field sport athletes, so they can kind of get away with not putting that much emphasis on their ankles and their toes because they're getting that stimulus every day from the sport that they play. If you're not playing a sport, which I wasn't because I was the strength and conditioning coach for a professional team, I was in the gym And I was interested in strength and conditioning. I was interested in being big and strong, and I was following the programs, but I wasn't doing a lot of running. I wasn't doing a lot of sport. And because of that, I got really fragile. And I think that's happening to a large majority of men. No one's going to compliment you, or outside of our circles at least, on the muscularity and vascularity of your feet. But if you have muscular and vascular feet, meaning lots of blood flow, and you can see certain muscles well developed, If you've got one side that's been chronically sore, you'll be able to see differences in the vascularity and muscularity in your feet. So there's bodybuilding for the feet as well. These are our two foundations. The strength side of things, we then do want to be able to progress it up to being able to do heavy, slow stuff. Heavy, slow stuff is still, it can be the solution. You've seen it with the ATG system, with, you know, that was what Poliquin was sort of working towards. But Poliquin put in, Poliquin's system used a lot of fascial treatments as well. They were doing, he recommended stretching, used ART, he used the fat tool, a number of different techniques in attempting to lengthen tissues and correct the, the fascial issues. What I've found is that the long-range work is a similar— has a similar effect to the isometrics that a lot of people are talking about for improving fascia. I think the long-range work is even more potent with improving the, the tissue quality. So if we get really strong in the short range, we get really strong in the long range, that's also going to decrease our chances of injury. For some, that alone works, right? Like maybe someone will comment, yeah, I just got to X amount on seated calf raises and standing calf raises, and then I never had any issues again with the Achilles. You'll, you'll hear that. You hear it from physios as well. You know, once someone can do 40 single leg calf raises, there's, there's no chance they're going to have Achilles pain and such. That approach can work, and it does work, but it's n 1. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't matter that it works for the majority and the research says it and blah blah blah. I'm interested in n 1, which is you getting back to doing the things that you love. So this is, this is the path to that. Which one of these is most important? Which one does the research favor most? Who cares? All we care about is getting back to the things that you love and you want to do. So this is not a good way to do studies because there's too many variables. It is a good way to rehab an individual who you want to get a fast result because you're doing all of the things, or many of the things, that you know are going to help. We can titrate them in 3 days at a time is usually what we do when working with somebody, and there's nuance if we can have a back and forth conversation. If you're in Dance Club or if you're in the mentorship, then we go back and forth to get these things fixed. But regardless of, uh, you know, that the journey of implementation is, is relatively simple once you understand the key concepts, and that's what I'm giving you today. So we need to get stronger. Seated calf raises, standing calf raises, KOT calf raises, machines, body weight— they all work. Calf raises on the slant. Focus on the short range first. Don't do long range exercises that aggravate the, the area. If you can get them light enough to the point where you can do them— often body weight even on two legs will be too heavy initially if you've got an irritated Achilles, but you might be able to go to half body weight or a quarter body weight stretch. This is where the couch stretch worked for a lot of people in the ATG system. Couch stretch is, is a very, very light long range contraction. I prefer to use the regressed reverse Nordic on the incline. There's another option that can scale more easily into load, and it's easier to get a bit more of a pump in the long range. We're sort of doing that same, same thing with the calf raise. And then the reason we have it in the first place is because we stopped playing. Children don't get Achilles issues. It's men in their 40s and 50s that snap their Achilles, and now increasingly professional players as well, because they've been trained in this modern athletic paradigm that doesn't emphasize and doesn't understand natural balance of the feet. One more thing on the, on the toes is my 9-year-old boy can walk on his toes. And the way that I'm saying I can now get up there to stand, I can press out from the ball of my feet. I'm not like kipping or jumping with my arms or anything, I'm just pressing it out with the toes. I can get the ball of the foot off the ground. He can walk around like that. I can't walk around like that yet. He doesn't train, he didn't train to be able to do that. He's not doing any organized sports. It's just a natural thing that a 9-year-old can do who hasn't worn tons of shoes or been inside of confinement for too much. He hasn't, he hasn't been through conventional schooling, but other than that, he's just a normal young boy and he can walk on his toes. So in my mind, we're doing all of this strength training to become superhuman and to go above and beyond what's natural. Well, at least we should be able to get to these natural levels. And because 99.99% of athletes, professional athletes, can't achieve what's normal for a 9-year-old, we're seeing Achilles and foot pain being more and more common, and it runs up the chain. The more issues we have with the Achilles and feet, or the weaker they are, the more likely we are to have calf, hamstring, hip, lower back, everything. Like, it's all connected. So we need to play. The reason he's got that ability is because he plays. So this is the other part of the rehabilitation, and I call it playhabilitation. Playhabilitation. And some people really don't like the idea of playhabilitation because they want that structure, 3 sets of 8, this is how we're going to fix it. But The, the reason children don't have this is because they play. And if the average gym bro learned to play again, not only would they be a lot happier and a lot healthier, they would have less foot and Achilles pain because they would be playing. I fell out of the habit of playing for many years. I didn't realize that it was a source of less than optimal mental experience of life. You can call it, you know, depression, or you can call it anxiety, or whatever you want to label when your brain doesn't feel as good. But when you don't play, you don't feel as good. It's very true for children. It's obvious to see in them. Same is true for adults. The same is true for, for every man. We need to play, and one of the ways that we can play is with the rope. The rope is a really, really good tool to be able to, to get back to foot function and Achilles function. We can do it just very statically initially, but yeah, we're just standing statically, boom, and then we can start to feel some transitions of this, something like a walking stimulus. If that's too much at the start, don't do it. Just stand on your two feet, maybe raise the heels off the ground. So we're here, heels off the ground. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And then as we get better at it, as the body starts to loosen up, or as you just wanna play more, then you bring the dance element into it. Boom. Boom. And it can continue to progress into more aggressive jumping. The slant, as I said, can be used with the strength protocol like we mentioned before, isometrics, but you can also use it to play on, so throwing the ball, using a basketball while you're standing on the slant. This is a way, downhill, is a way that you're gonna have less load onto the Achilles, less stretch. And then dance. So yeah, for some, dance, dance is fun, dance is easy, dance is something they've grown up with. For others, it's very foreign. For the majority of men in the modern cultures of the West, dance has been taken out of our cultures. Put some music on, find some sort of simple movement. If it's too much, again, just regress it, let the heels touch the ground. Go slower. But we want— the playhabilitation concept is that we need different lines of force, different angles. If you look into differential strength training, the work of Wolfgang Schulhorn, it's very clear that we need different lines of force. And just sticking to one training program with one type of loading will never prepare you optimally for the, for the world. The only way you can do a simple training program and survive it is if you're playing at the same time. If you're going and playing basketball then you can do a really simple training program. Otherwise, it's not a good approach. You have to be playing. If you're not ready to play basketball, then these are some tools that allow us to be able to play. The soccer ball is also a great one for if we wanna work on the feet and the Achilles because we spend so much time on one foot. Being able to stand on one foot and make the micro adjustments that that happen with the ball. This is the playability concept. Progress it into, you know, you're kicking against the wall. You can do your juggles and such. We can do them that sort of can-can style. So it can get more and more aggressive in terms of getting more bounce and such into it, but it also scales back. It's good for your mentality as well. A lot of people put themselves in cotton wool when they have an injury, meaning they stop doing everything, they try and fully rest, and they just sit and cry themselves to sleep. Day and night about, 'Woe is me, I've got this warning light on in my body,' and it's not worth crying about. It's not going to help you to be, you know, moping and feeling sorry for yourself. Get to work with these things, but then the play side of it can help you to feel good as you're going through this. Change the mental state. That's also going to help with the healing if we can get into a more, a better state of mind, state of body. More parasympathetic state, etc. A more joyful life is a less painful life. Sometimes we have to go into the foot posture stuff, and I think that's an interesting side. I haven't worked on it as much as I will. I've definitely— I've been doing some work on it, but part of the issue with, with some of this stuff can be that we need to strengthen the ability to pronate. Often the, the arch and the inside of the shin becomes weak, and, and the line of force through the Achilles isn't the way it's meant to go because we've got this collapse thing and then we're pushing off this collapse thing. If we're not in biological alignment, then we're going to experience more pain. So a lot of the pain of the modern world is because sitting and the way we train, etc., has changed the modern posture. And this is where functional patterns and work— and a lot of these guys, you know, Paul Chek's been onto it for a long time— they're onto something in saying that our bodies are out of alignment and it's causing a lot of pain. If you're using— you have to use the tool for what it's meant to be used for. So if you use hammer as a screwdriver, you're going to mess up your screws and you're going to mess up the thing that you're building, and you're not going to get the screw in, in the way that the screw is meant to go in. Well, the same is true for your Achilles. You're meant to use your Achilles as an Achilles, which means you need to bounce, which means the toes should be doing their job, but it also means that it needs to be in the alignment that it's meant to be in. And this goes for the whole of the body. There is an optimal alignment, the Gota idea, um, you know, kind of from work, that there's a certain pattern, there's a certain way of moving that the animal kingdom works through, and that's also true for us. There's, there's real value in these concepts, and, and foot posture plays its part. The problem that happens is that sometimes some of the people who fall in love with the posture concepts, they want to forget about the physics of training, and they don't— they refuse to look at, or they stop paying attention to what works in track and field, what works for other sports. Force still matters, and the progression of force, the progression of load, and doing that intelligently matters. Yes, it's good to work on alignment, especially if it's clearly out. My issue is in my right foot, and my right foot has had more alignment issues. So like, I should have gone down that path more, but even without going down that path, I was able to fix it by just dealing with the physics of it. And mostly the big difference for me was strengthening the toes and then just bouncing consistently, sometimes through a little bit of pain, but just committing to jumping every day at a certain level. I've understood it more and more as I've gone through, and as I've explained to you how to, how to get started with that. But this is another place to look at and to work on if there's clearly alignment issues. I just wouldn't throw out the whole rest of what we know works for athletes in favor of that paradigm. I think it needs to be understood, but it needs to be incorporated rather than having a war between the two ideas, which is the way we've been socially engineered to think about these things. Hope this helps. Questions are welcome. And yeah, let's get back to bouncing. I know it's much more fun to go through life where you can sprint and play and jump. And if you would like to see a video about another part of the body, if there's something else that I can help you out with, more than welcome to do that. The Dents Club has begun. We have over 50 men in there. We've got a custom app. We've got solutions to all the different body part issues that I've had in the past or that I've helped people to be able to improve, as well as how to get super powerful, how to get all the skills that can change the way that you work as well, and also how to produce a lot of force and get the body that produces a lot of force. This is what Dance Club is about building the ultimate athlete. It's aligned with the New Athlete Project philosophy, but it's, it's the way to practically implement it, to make it really simple to implement. It's all laid out. Every day has a program and a template. We have coaches in there customizing, and it's getting better and better every day. So if you would like to be involved with the Dance Club, now is the best time to do that. It's less of a financial commitment right now than it will be in the future because We've just launched it and we're bringing together the team. I hope this helps and yeah, look forward to hearing the success stories. Let's get bouncing.