9December 2021
(upbeat music) – Hi folks, I'm Bob
Schrupp, physical therapist. – Brad Heineck, physical therapist. – Together we are the most famous physical therapists on the internet. – In our opinion, of course, Bob. – Here we are in our secret
bunker again, Brad. Today we're gonna talk about
the three steps to stop achilles tendon pain, quickly at home. This is one that comes up
quite often on the weekend athlete, Brad. They've been
kinda sedentary all week and then all of the sudden they
ramp up of a sport and all of the sudden they feel some severe pain.
– Yeah and start limping a little bit. – By the way if you're new
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work Bob. All right so, Achilles Tendonitis or Achilles
strain or pain, whatever it is that hurts when you walk
that tendon is a very large tendon. Accepts a lot of
force but it can get injured. And it's painful and if it
happens to the point where it's swollen up or it's very tender
the first thing you wanna do is get a cold-pack on it for
15 minutes, 2 or 3 times a day. That's not one of the first
steps though, Bob. That's just a preliminary. Once you get
to the point where you're walking is painful but it's
not really bad, you're ready to get moving on with it. The
first phase we wanna work at, the first step, is get the
muscle that is attached to this tendon, the calf muscles,
the Soleus and the Gastroc, and loosen those up. Now I
just watched a nice video, an updated most recently
treatment for this and they say what you should do for muscle
massage on the calf is a technique called stripping
and what you do is — it's a little bit hard to do on yourself
but you can.
You take your thumbs and you go in deep
into the muscle and you go towards the knee. And then
you come back and go towards the knee. So you're going
with the fibers of the muscle. – [Bob] Yeah you're really
digging in deep aren't you Brad? – [Brad] Yeah. Exactly. As deep as really humanly possible. – [Brad] Yep and you might find
a tight spot and if you get on a tight spot you work
that more than the rest. – [Bob] Thing is, you wanna
have those calf muscles as pliable as possible cause
the looser they are the less stress they're putting on the
tendon with every step, with every run, with every jump
so, that's the idea is that you wanna be like, well, like
a subtle leopard.
That's a book I'm reading right now. – I knew something had to be
in there I was hoping anyways. Now you do that until your
thumbs get tired that should be about 3 or 4 minutes for most
people. If you do happen to have a massager, we like
this Renpho massager it's got great travel and really
gets in deep and makes this a lot easier and you can
tell. So I'm just gonna do the stripping technique with the
massage gun and much easier, much more — it just feels
great. It's a nice, nice technique. You're not gonna
get down on the tendon with this, so we got another
technique that's gonna be working on that. So you can
do this 3 times a day for about 5 minutes each time. – [Bob] So, if you're stripping
do you wanna poll Brad? Brad this is a family show! – Bob! Why Bob? Why do I put
up with this? Year upon year upon year without respect.
– By the way we are maintaining
our social distance here. 6 feet look at that. – So this is the next technique.
This is one that we found very affective. – [Bob] This is very affective,
this is the money-maker here I would say Brad. – [Brad] So you take
your fingers, either your pointer finger or your thumb
or put your middle finger and your pointer and grab the tendon.
Around it. Now we're gonna do a cross-friction massage
back and forth this way. What you do is pinch in and
you get a pretty good pinch on there and you work it back
and forth.
Now it's gonna hurt at first and after about
30 seconds it should start to feel either numb-ish or
start to feel better. If those are the two sensation — on
or the other — you feel, at that point you're good. You're
gonna go until your fingers get tired and you say "oh
that's enough". If by chance it hurts and after 30 seconds
it just gets worse and worse it's not ready. You need
ice, go to the ice treatment some more and give it a day or so. – [Bob] A common mistake
that a lot of people make is they rub on the back of the
tendon. You really wanna rub on the two sides like Brad
is doing like a pincher.
Because that's where generally
the tears and the micro-tears have occurred and you're trying
to help heal stronger, and you're trying to help
break-up that scar tissue. – Now the next thing you wanna
do, this is phase two, is some stretching on the muscle
you can start out — if you got a cain or something like
this, you can stretch like this – – but you can skip this step
actually a lot of times — you should have your shoe on
so I'm gonna this is the one so I don't take the time to
put my shoe on. You can simply do a chair or use a wall,
lean into the wall and stretch it like this. Don't let
your toe point out get it straight in line. You're gonna
hold these 15 to 30 seconds. – [Bob] You can go ahead and
stretch with the leg straight and you can also stretch with
the knee bent. Just gets a little bit of different muscles there.
– [Brad] It's a good,
complete way to do it. I like to do it off the edge of a step. – Oh sure, we don't have
a step in the bunker here. – No we don't have a step in the bunker. – [Brad] If you have an
incline board these work great. These really work nice. So if you have one take advantage of it. Again you're gonna hold that – [Bob] This is actually my
wife's one. She puts it right by her computer and she
has a standing table there she just stretches once in a
while.
She was having trouble with her calf muscle and she
no longer does because she was doing preventative stretching. – It's all about just doing
these things. The next thing you wanna get is your
proprioception and your balance back in place. Again, you're
gonna do it with your shoe on — you could do it on
your bare foot but I'm gonna pretend my left foot is the
one that was injured. Just because I don't wanna take
the time to put the shoe on. You're gonna see if you can
balance and, this is what they recommend for the average
person, if you can balance for 60 seconds, without losing
your balance, you're good. Okay, and you'll find out the
injured foot will always be not as capable to balance as
your good foot if you compare. – Yeah you can compare back and forth and see where you're at. – Once you get to that 60
seconds if you wanna challenge yourself because you're gonna
be a higher level active person maybe going back to
a sport then you need to get something soft and squishy.
You can just take the cushion off of a chair in the living
room or you can use this Pete's – – what is it? Pete's Choice Balance Pad.
– [Bob] They make some nice pads. – [Brad] Yeah it is nice and
you'll see it's squishy and it really forces those muscles
to work and kicks in that nervous system so your balance
can recover quickly here. Again 60 seconds on that when
you can do that easily, you go to phase three and
this is strengthening. So we're just gonna start —
again shoes are gonna be on both feet and you're gonna
just do toe-ups. Now I always recommend for the average
person that's reasonably active, you should be able to do
20 toe-ups comfortably. – [Bob] You may start off
with less but eventually you should be able to do 20. – So you do them with both
feet. When you get to 20 and your sore foots feeling
better, then you go just on the sore foot and you start doing that.
You do as many as you can,
again trying to get to 20 and do those 2 to 3 times per day
on these. And then, for those people who are gonna get into
an active sport, running, baseball, whatever, then
you need to add in — again both shoes will be on — just two leg hopping. You're
gonna do that for 30 seconds if you can do that with zero
pain, it feels good, then you can go into just one leg
— oh I can't use that stick I'll just grab this chair —
then you can start hopping on the sore leg for 30 seconds
but I should be pain-free. Only fatigue. You don't wanna
re-injure it so if it's — thank for coming up to my face
Mike — were you just getting me from the waist down? So 30
seconds pain-free, then you get back to your activity
and gently work into that. Overall Bob I think we've
covered this head-to-toe. – Yeah the idea is that you
wanna be under control when you start hopping, so that's
why you need to do it in a controlled circumstance as
opposed to — like when you're playing basketball who knows
you might have to do a great leap.
So start putting some
stress on the area and see how it handles it. See how
it is the next day even. – Right – Make sure that it didn't
get sore from that. If it is you have to go back to the drawing board. – Right. – I'm losing my ear here — my ear piece. – Very good Bob once again I
think we've covered another part of the body and we can fix
just about anything except.. – A broken heart, but we're working on it. – Yes we are. – Even from a distance,
we're working on it. – Say no more..