Dealing with Pain on Top of the Foot

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Hey everybody and welcome back to the Runners Connect Extra Kick Podcast. We’re going to get into today’s question from Sandeep.

Sandeep: Hi. I have pain in my feet and its usually at the center of my right foot. What should I be doing different for the pain to subside?

Jeff: Thank you very much Sandeep. I appreciate the question. To be honest, it is difficult to answer in this format since, there’s not a lot of detail and I’m not able to examine if the pain is under your foot or on the top of your foot.

I’m not going to able to provide you specific guidance on your issue now, but I can run down how I would approach this, if you were looking for a consultation about how we can fix it.

The first thing that you need to do is to somehow understand your injury and what it is. See a good doctor in your area specifically somebody who specializes in running injuries.

It could be a general practitioner, an orthopedic, a chiropractor, a physical therapist, or basically anybody that maybe specializes in runners.

If you don’t have somebody locally available to you, I would recommend a couple good online resources. Visit a website called steadymd.com

They are couple of runners who are also doctors and they basically specialize in providing services for runners like being your personal running doctor in addition to all the other normal things that a doctor would do.

There’s an option there I know there are some physical therapist that work online. We offer that service as part of our Runners Connect membership.

You can schedule a consultation over Skype. They’ll do their best to examine you with the webcam and then let you know what your injuries going to be, what a rehab program would be, how to treat it etcetera.

There may be other physical therapists out there that do that as well. Something you can consider.

Finally, we do have a plethora of resources.

We have an injury prevention summit that we just did that has a ton of information on foot injuries or you can google our site for foot injuries. That at least gives you a way to understand what’s going on.

Once you have it diagnosed, you’re going to have a specific plan. My general feeling is that you’re really going to boil down to a few things.

The first is probably going to be understanding why this injury happened. We want to look at footwear as a potential cause.

Was there pain in your foot? Maybe the shoes are too tight, or maybe it was the wrong type of shoe. If it’s a plain or fashion issue, is there’s a cushioning support issue? That sort of thing. We’re making sure that the that you have the right footwear to prevent this from happening again.

Along the same lines, we want to look at strengthening. That would also mean strengthening not only the foot itself.

You can do specific exercises to strengthen your feet like toe grabs and ankle exercises. Those are going to be important for you regardless, but also looking up the kinetic chain.

Obviously, your issue is in your foot but it’s quite possible that that foot injury is being caused by weak hips or something else that is creating undue pressure on your foot.

One of the things you may want to look at is potentially getting a gait analysis of yourself. Try to find if there’s any real kink in your kinetic chain that is contributing to an injury.

Once you find those things, work on a strengthening program to make sure that you eliminate any additions.

Strengthen that area so that you can be running with a more fluid form. This is going to help prevent you putting undue stress on your foot.

Finally, we’re going to talk about straight treatment. Stretching a massage are probably going to be two modalities that you use.

Look at doing some foot stretches and then doing some self-massage as well with your hands or across a ball to help loosen up that area if it’s not a stress fracture.

I know for Sandeep that’s not a specific answer to your question, but I hope it gave you and anybody else who’s listening a good understanding of how I would mentally approach diagnosing and then healing an injury.

Also, the type of things that you’d be looking at implementing in your training throughout the week or training cycle, to help get it back to healthy and to prevent as well.

If you have your own questions, head to runnersconnect.net/daily and one of our expert coaches will answer that question for you on our podcast.

It could be anything related to running. We’ll try to help you out specifically as well as give general advice.

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Thank you so much have a great run today.