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Its been a few years since I really struggled with plantar fasciitis.

When it first came about, it was awful. The pain was bizarre. It was a sharp pain and a dull pain at the same time in my heel and in my arch.

A few things were able to minimize the pain. But that’s the key word, minimize. Nothing got rid of the pain of plantar fasciitis.

It felt hopeless after a while. I had to give up running because walking was already tough. I couldn’t play soccer anymore because I couldn’t even wear normal shoes anymore, let alone kick a ball.

I had lost about a year of my active life to this injury and it was bothering me so much. An entire summer passed me by with no chance of activity.

After months of heavy duty research, I started coming into different forms of recovery options. I wouldn’t really call them alternative but they definitely weren’t mainstream.

The mainstream options were ridiculous if I’m being honest. None of them did a single thing for me or my pain. You know why? Because they didn’t understand the cause of the problem. They assumed the arches of your feet were just weak. But it’s not a matter of strength, it’s a matter of blood flow.

But I had to go through the motions of trying the other options first: I rolled the bottom of my feet on countless firm objects, I stretched different muscles in my legs, I wore shoes with more padding and added insoles to some of them, I did several foot and ankle strengthening exercises like foot crunches, lateral movements, toe drills, balancing on a foot while pulling on cables, and so on.

None of them did anything meaningful. Because again, these all assumed that my feet were weak when that’s not what the problem was. The problem was a lack of blood flow.

The First Game Changer

It took me over a year to learn that plantar fasciitis is actually a misdiagnosis. The condition should be called plantar fasciosis. The suffix ‘itis’ means inflammation while ‘osis’ means tissue death. Tissue (muscle tissue) is “dying” because blood is not able to circulate properly through your feet and reach the bottom of them to provide the nutrition that blood carries.

The blood can’t circulate through your feet because you almost certainly have adhesions (knotted up muscle tissue and fascia) that is blocking the blood from reaching that spot.

For me personally, I had a lot of these adhesions in my lower legs, particularly the calves. This is why you will routinely hear me talk about myofascial release. This is one of the biggest changes in my life that I felt when it came to my pain level.

The day of trying myofascial release on my calves versus the day after trying it was literally like night and day for my level of pain. I felt so noticeably better just from doing it intensely one time. I genuinely couldn’t believe the difference.

This was actually after I tried the other life changing thing for my foot, which was minimalist/barefoot shoes.

The Second Game Changer

The particular shoes that did it for me were the Hanas made by Xero Shoes. I remember putting them on and instantly feeling more space compared to the other shoes I had been wearing like New Balance’s, Birkenstocks, and others.

This was the main key. Again, everyone thinks the feet are weak so they advocate to get shoes with more support, a tighter fit, extra cushion.

It’s actually the opposite. You need to get out of the way of your feet and let them do their thing!

That’s why Xero Shoes are so effective, they facilitate natural foot function with their trademark attributes: wide toe box, zero drop sole, flat and non-cushioned sole, no heel counter, lightweight, and so flexible that the shoe can be rolled up into a ball.

These attributes perfectly counter the detriments of normal shoes: narrow toe box, too heavy, massive toe spring, heel is placed above the ball of the foot, your movement is motion-controlled, etc.

After putting these shoes on, I found myself able to walk longer distances again. This was not something I had done in a long time because the pain had kept me walking only from one end of the room to the other for quit a while.

Now, I was at least able to take walks outside again. These shoes provided me enough cushion to pad my foot from the hard ground while still allowing my foot to function naturally so that I could do standard things on my feet again.

This, coupled with walking on grass all the time, had me making quick progress compared to being completely sidelined from activity.