If you run in Oceanside or anywhere in North County, you’ve probably either dealt with plantar fasciitis yourself or know someone who has. It has a frustrating pattern: it gets better when you rest, then comes back the moment you pick up mileage again. That cycle isn’t bad luck. It has a specific mechanical explanation, and once you understand it, it’s actually a solvable problem.
Why runners get plantar fasciitis
The plantar fascia absorbs load with every step. Training errors are the most common cause it STARTS. Things like increasing mileage too quickly, adding speed work too early, switching shoes, running on harder surfaces.
But here’s the weird part: once it starts, these aren’t the things you need to address to get it to GO AWAY.
This isn’t intuitive and is a big reason many people get stuck. So, let’s make sure that YOU don’t get caught in the same trap.
The ankle connection most runners miss
When the ankle can’t move forward enough during the push-off phase of running, the foot compensates by pronating, and the plantar fascia takes on excessive tensile load with every stride. Limited ankle mobility is one of the most consistent findings in runners with plantar fasciitis, and it’s almost never the thing that gets treated.
Pronation is an essential part of propulsion, we want the arch of the foot to collapse. It creates a spring effect that allows you to generate force moving forward. In fact, if your arch doesn’t pronate, as is often the case in people with excessively high arches, they’ll get a pinching, or impingement, in the front of their ankle.
There is an important distinction between your arch pronating, and collapsing. We want your arch to pronate, not collapse. When it collapses excessively, and repetitively, the plantar fascia becomes the backstop or safety guard and is forced to perform a function it isn’t designed to. When this happens, you feel pain.
As I stated above, its very possible to have low or weak arches but to not be in pain until you load to tissues more than they can handle. Once this happens, because of how much time we spend on our feet each day, it takes a very structured approach to allow the tissue to recovery while simultaneously increasing their tolerance to load. Let’s talk more about that now.
The load management piece
Rest reduces symptoms because it reduces load. But it doesn’t fix the fascia, improve ankle mobility, or build calf strength. So when you return to running, the same mechanics are still there. The right approach keeps you running as much as possible while systematically addressing the underlying mechanics.
Think of a tissue’s “load tolerance,” the same way you think about a muscle’s strength. It isn’t surprising that a muscle will hurt if you consistently try to lift weights that are beyond what it is strong enough to handle. It isn’t different for our connective tissue. For it to tolerate a certain “load,” we need to do things that increases the tissue’s load tolerance. If we load a tissue more than it has tolerance for, it will start to hurt.
When StemWave accelerates recovery
For runners who’ve been dealing with plantar fasciitis for more than a few months, the fascial tissue often needs more than just load management and load tolerance. StemWave restarts the healing response in degenerated tissue, making rehabilitation work more effective and shortening the overall recovery timeline.
If you want to get rid of your plantar fasciitis issue once and for all, if you’re tired of it interrupting your training, and you want guidance to overcome it quickly, come in for an assessment and let’s get you back on the road.
If you want to contact us or book an appointment, check our business profile page.
Dr. Jonny Blue is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and founder of Land and Sea Physical Therapy in Oceanside, CA. He specializes in orthopedic PT, root cause methodology, and helping active adults in North County San Diego get back to the activities they love without surgery or pain medication.