Are your hips the source of your leg and foot pain? It’s our tendency both as patients and clinicians to focus on the site of pain - but often with soft tissue injuries (especially in the leg and foot) the site of injury is merely the tip of the iceberg for your rehab and recovery.
This is why it’s so important to have a clinician who fully understands your injury and can work with you to fully complete your course of rehab (even after the initial pain has passed). If you’re struggling with ongoing pain - call us today to get expert analysis and treatment to get back to doing the things you love.
So what’s actually going on?
Regardless of whether your injury is in your knee, foot, or other part of the leg or hip - it is vital to understand the context in which the injury occurs. True, the painful tissue has been overwhelmed and damaged - but the context tells us more about the why and the how. If we understand this and get you working to fix it as early as possible we stand the best chance at getting you back into action rapidly.
The foot and knee are at one end of a long and inter-related chain of joints and muscles that link your torso to the ground at your foot - and ultimately the hip and leg have to control and power every step when you walk or run, or lift weights etc. The hips can be viewed as a keystone of support for the body and a slight hip drop can cause a cascade of effects down the movement chain, and cause loading hotspots in joints, soft tissues and muscles. The graphic below nicely shows this cascade as numbered steps 1-5.
Over time these small errors can lead to substantial excesses of load on certain parts of the knee or foot - and this then leads to tissue pain and inflammation. However, it is morehelpful to think of these hotspots as inevitable consequence of the whole movement chain deficit.
Now, thankfully we’ll look after all this for you in-clinic and give you the appropriate exercises to sort things out - but why wait? You can incorporate hip stability and strengthening in your training today and head off problems before they occur.
Simply performing some of your current training with an ankle or knee band can be all you need to get things going (such as squats or bridges).
Other good choices are to incorporate a swiss ball into your training routine.
And of course any drill where you push your leg away and to the side of your body, with or without resistance.
