Should you embrace the barefoot sensation?

The thinking behind barefoot training

Barefoot running is certainly nothing new and many of the most popular running events, including the Olympics have seen barefoot competitors take home the title.

The more recent surge in the popularity of barefoot training is attributed to a recent publication, Born to Run, released by journalist Chris MacDougall in 2009. In his book, MacDougall recounts how he managed to overcome certain debilitating injuries by utilising barefoot running techniques from primitive Indian tribes in Mexico.

The thinking behind the approach is that removing the cushioning of the shod foot significantly alters the human running gait, which increases the level of involvement of the muscles around the feet and creates a more intense workout. Some supporters also claim that athletic shoes provide unnecessary support and that our bodies were naturally built and born to run.

Criticism has arisen around some of the risks associated with barefoot training especially training on certain surfaces, such as concrete or asphalt which can be quite hard on the joints. Sceptics also point out that our modern society has been developed in a way that demands shoes.

If you are keen to try barefoot running (even if it’s just to satisfy your curiosity about the shoes) here are some important considerations before you try barefoot running:

1. Professional Advice –it’s important to get professional and/or medical advice before starting a new training or fitness program. Be sure to disclose any health problems and past injuries to get the most appropriate advice.
2. Terrain – consider where you’ll be running. It may be worthwhile to start with softer surfaces such as along the beach and to start off by working a few barefoot running sessions into your normal routine.
3. Hygiene – it goes without saying that you should be mindful of your surroundings and of your fellow gym members. Bring a training mat or invest in minimal shoes like the Vibram Five Fingers if you will be training barefoot indoors.

Personal trainers, what do you think about barefoot running? Have you incorporated it into your training routine?

Author Bio: Paige writes on fitness and wellbeing as well as personal training courses for aspiring trainers.

Once you have mastered these exercises, keep them in your routine, but add some more challenging work. Activation comes first, we need to isolate the muscle in order for it to get going, but you pretty soon need to move into some more functional movement for the bum. Check out these bum exercises, a post a wrote a while ago that explains and shows you some of the best exercises to get strong glutes. Glute activation is very important for getting stable and strong hips…but we must always remember to progress.

The shoulder is a very mobile joint, one nor built for stability. Saying that, even a small biomechanical imbalance can mean an injury. Shoulder injuries are both common and painful. Overuse problems such as tendinitis can sneak up on you and are relatively hard to get rid of without rest or constant treatment. Luckily there are usually a number of easily fixable underlying problems. Some of which we will be addressing here

Self soft tissue work is probably the beat recovery you can do on your own. Considering not all of us have large wallets, getting professional help all the time is difficult… But you can get almost the same benefits whenever you want with some very cheap tools.

The parts we will look at working on today are jut some typical problematic areas. These are usually tight or issues on a lot of people and cause problems. Be aware that this might not be you, but there is a fair bet that these will give you some relief.

PECS

The pec muscles, minor and major are responsible for shoulder flexion, adduction and also contributes to internal rotation. Whether it be too much bench press in relation to back work ( common mistake) or simple sitting at the desk too much or walking with terrible posture… A lot of us have some sort of tightness in the pecs. This means that your shoulder are rounded, and your already small and squished in Glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) becomes even smaller and with less space for tendons to move through. Pec releases and stretches will go a long way to loosening and opening up your shoulders.

Excerpt taken from Tennis Ball series…Yes, I look a little like a dead fish, but it’s the most effective way to get at these babies. You will find the best response comes from the upper pecs, where the muscle starts to get smaller and go into your shoulder. It’s a big muscle, so play around. Lay on the ground with the ball underneath you. Roll around a little until you find tight and tender spots, then hold. This is a pretty painful one, but very necessary in almost everyone.

Pec Stretch

LATS

Instead of going through everything again I will direct you to a post I wrote not long ago on the lats…. The why and how.

Latissimus Dorsi Soft Tissue Work

INFRASPINATUS AND TERES MINOR

Maybe it’s just me, and highly likely given my volleyball profession, but this muscle causes me a lot of problems. Get it with a tennis ball. Again head to this Tennis Ball post and scroll down to Rotator Cuff…detailed explanations on how to hit it there.

There are many other spots you can work, but I find if you hit the pecs and lats constantly, you will be going a long way to keeping your shoulder pain and injury free

Here is a picture of the lat dorsi.

As you can see it is huge, attaches on various places… Vertebre, pelvis, ribs, scapula and humerus to be exact, which means that it can cause a whole lot more problems than just in the shoulder, but I digress. The movements it performs are extension of the humerus, adduction of the humerus in two planes, and perhaps most importantly internal rotation of the humerus.

Lat dorsi too tight or malfunctioning…means too much internal rotation, which means imbalances, which means many possible shoulder pathologies ouch as impingement. Not only that, the lats have a significant effect on the movement and stability of the scapula. I won’t go into too much detail here as I want to get to the good stuff, the soft tissue work, but the scapula plays an imperative role in shoulder function and stability. Without a nice functioning scap, you’re screwed. On top of all this, simple trigger points in the lat dorsi can refer pain to the front of the shoulder, so you want them out.

I will go into this large muscle more in the future and delve into why it can cause a whole lot of problems, and why a strong and well functioning lat dorsi can actually improve performance in many measures, but for now, we will move onto the soft tissue work, and how to save your shoulder from a lot of pain.

This video explains how to do self myofascial release on the foam roller for your latissimus dorsi. Be aware, and I am not joking, that if you have not done this before… it bloody hurts. It’s a large muscle that does a lot of work and is on most people generally very tight and full of trigger points.

This video shows you how to perform a release on the lats with a lacrosse ball. As you may have seen in my tennis ball series, a lacrosse ball isn’t always necessary. Anything that size is great to get the trigger points…but remember if you think the foam roller hurt, this will at the start be almost unbearable. Helps prevent and cure shoulder pain though, so toughen up.

Heres to a healthy shoulder

Soft tissue work is the best thing for the hip flexors, and combined with stretches it is very effective. If you can get a professional to release them you will get the best results. Not all of us have the opportunity to get a massage as often as we would like or need, so it is important to be able to do your own soft tissue work at home. There are a couple of methods that you can do at home, and they are using a foam roller and also a tennis ball/ massage ball.

Everyone should invest in a foam roller. It’s the easiest method to do your own soft tissue work at home. Check out this foam roller on amazon, comes in different lengths.

Now…as I explained above the Rec Fem, which is a muscle that actually crosses the hip and the knee is part of the hip flexors, and is the first one that you can do work on by yourself with the foam roller. Here are two videos showing you how to do it.

Remember at first that it can be very painful, especially if you have never had anyone do any work on you before. Points that hurt more, stay on them, eventually the pain will start to fade away. These points that you hit may be trigger points, you can hit them even harder later with a tennis ball. Ensure that you do this often, at the start a couple of times a day. The fact is that tight hip flexors are often a result of our lifestyle. A lot of us work sitting down and our hip flexor muscles are in a shortened position all the time, so we need to do regular soft tissue work to counter act the fact that we are tightening the hips daily.

Try to work up as high as you can, you will hit the lower part of the psoas as well. Combine this with the tennis ball work and stretching regularly and you will be well on your way to releasing your hip flexors and reducing your pain.

My favourite foam roller, hurts…but very effective. I use the small grey one, the hardest one. Purple is medium strength, blue the mildest.

What Is Wrong With Most Knee Rehabilitation Programs?

Too often they focus on the knee itself. As obvious as it may seem, this usually will not give you the relief you need and is not the cause of the problem. To have a healthy knee as a general rule you will need to have good mobility in the hip and the ankle, a strong knee joint, and have correct biomechanics when moving.

You may have heard about the VMO and it’s role in helping knee pain. That you need to activate the VMO preferentially and get it stronger in order to avoid knee pain. Sure, you may have some imbalances in the knee. but new research has shown that this might not be the case and activating this muscle by itself is extremely difficult.

Often you need to look elsewhere other than the root of the pain to find solutions. Think about patella tendonitis. The tendon is usually inflamed and overused, the tendon attaches to the quads, holy crap we best be fixing those quads then… right? Nope. Why would you do even more quad dominated exercises, try to fix imbalances around the knee if the problem is actually an overuse of the knee? Surely there are some biomechanics issues and weaknesses going on in surrounding joints, putting a whole lot of pressure onto the tendon.

If your hip or your ankle is malfunctioning, tight, immobile or weak you are automatically going to put pressure up or down the chain. Your knee is a significant part of that chain and it is often forced to do a lot more work than necessary.

So How Can I Help My Knee Pain?

Realise that everything that comes next is a general rule to help reduce chronic knee pain, and most of it comes from my own experience. As a volleyball player my knees take a beating, and these things without fail help to reduce my pain every day. Try them all and see what works for you, where you are lacking, and what you need the most.

Strengthen/ Activate

Lets forget the quads for a bit here, sure some of you may suffer from an ‘imbalance’ in the VMO and laterals quads, but I’m pretty sure you suffer from weak or inactive glutes as well. Realise that the glutes themselves may be strong, you just have an inability to get them to fire and activate, and use your quads instead.

People with knee pain often have poor hip control. The knee ends up doing a lot of work that in reality the hip should be doing. In order to take the pressure off the knees it is imperative that you get your glutes strong and functioning. The bridge is a great exercise to start with, do 3 sets of 15 on each leg, I promise you that will be hard. Start double legged if you need.

Check out this video on glute activation I made a while ago.

Last but not least here are 8 exercises that really engage your glutes. Enjoy.

Bum Exercises

Honestly, weak and inactive glutes are a huge contributor to knee pain, and an easy fix. The stronger your glutes are the less your knees are going to have to work.

Calf strength has recently come into play, and Aussie physic Jill Cook has done a lot of research into calf raises and how they can help reduce knee pain in general. Try to add in a couple of sets of body weight calf raises overtime you head to the gym, do a workout or a training session. Strong calves again mean less pressure through the knee, as they do a lot of work in take off and landing and do a lot of work absorbing eccentric forces.

Stretch

Stretching the right places is imperative, as we have discussed before. Stretching the wrong places can sometimes hinder your objective. One place that it is absolutely certain you need to stretch, are the hip flexors. One of the major hip flexors is the Rec Fem. It’s the muscle that attaches from your hip right onto your tendon, it is the most superficial muscle of the quads.

It can often get tight and cause a whole lot of knee pain. So stretch the hip flexors in general. Tight hip flexors will also result in a bum that is not as active, thanks to reciprocal inhibition. Stretch them, tight hip flexors suck and cause a lot of issues.

Self Soft Tissue Work

What is even better than stretching? Soft tissue work. Obviously the best thing you can do is go and get a professional to work out your kinks, but thankfully there is a much cheaper solution, and one that works pretty well. I am constantly using a foam roller and tennis ball/ massage ball to help relieve a lot of my knee pain. Here are the two I use…the thera roll is a crazy invention, hurts like nothing else, but really does give you a good myofascial release. It is better than your average foam roller, but to take it one step further, you should get on the tennis or massage ball.

Key parts to work on should be the…

Rec Fem

It is really important to give your rec fem an absolute beating. Roll it out to start, focus us and down the muscle, but eventually get onto the tennis ball, it will really help your knee pain. Pics and videos to follow, in the meantime lay face down, place the foam roller or tennis ball directly under the middle of your qauds, and move up and down. If you find a sensitive area, or trigger point, start flexing the knee.

Hip Flexors

Glutes

TFL

ITB

All these places, especially the Rec Fem, have the tendency to be tight and overused and with a little releasing will go a long way to relieving your knee pain. Tight glutes transmit onto the TFL and the ITB, a lot of stress on the ITB is a big cause of knee pain. Lets address all of these areas with some soft tissue work. You can see above the pics on how to use a massage or tennis ball, check out this video as well on using a foam roller. Remember that the thera roll gets in a little deeper.

Mobility

Having mobile joints above and below the knee are imperative to knee health. The ankle and the hip need to be mobile and moving correctly in order for your knee to function optimally and take the stress off it.

Here are some videos on exactly how to get that mobility through your ankle and hip.

Ankle

Hip

Check out this hip mobility guide at Volleyball Base.

Here are some more vids to help you.

Like I said guys, all of these things may not work for everyone, and most of them I have come across through experimentation. I help my own pain by continually applying these principles. Try it out, I have no doubt you will be able to reduce your knee pain significantly.

A calf trigger point will mean possible pain in the foot, heel, arch achilles or knee, as well as in the calf area itself. They can be the cause and aggravator of the painful syndrome plantar fasciitis. The point is, you want to get these trigger points out of your calf muscles, as they can lie dormant for a while and bite you in the bum when you don’t even know it.

Here is a picture of where you can locate some common calf trigger points both in the gastrocnemius, which is the more superficial muscle, and the soleus, the deeper muscle. Keep in mind when you are doing your therapy the way I describe, you don’t need to just focus on these areas, you might have some other tight areas that are or are close to trigger points that you can get some relief from working out.

Common calf trigger points

Middle pic is gastrocnemius, right pic is soleus.

How To Release Calf Trigger Points

OK now the how to. Here is an excerpt from my post on lower body trigger points. Remember that you can try to target the areas you see in the above picture, but a little bit of all round massage won’t hurt you either.

How To:
Start on your bum, raise yourself a little (the more of your body that is raised off the ground, the more pressure you can put through the ball…) and place the ball underneath your calves. Roll right from the Achilles up to under the knee. Slowly. Stop on any tender points and hold. As the calf is pretty wide, you might need to try a few lines, i.e medial, middle and lateral. See how you go.

The best thing you can do is experimentation, there isn’t one way to do everything, and you might find relief from using a tennis ball and rolling on it as I have shown above, using your own hands, getting someone else to get in there, or seeing a professional. Remember if the pain keeps on going, the latter is necessary.

My acupuncture treatment 2 weeks ago for knee pain...one in hand, shin and foot.

Chronic knee pain is something that hits a lot of people, and although I believe there are a lot of things you can do to ensure you have healthy knees, acupuncture is a treatment that will definitely make a difference. Especially in conjunction with lifestyle and biomechanical changes. Acupressure for knee pain is something you can do at home with your fingers in place of the needles, not as effective, but definitely another way to treat the pain.

Here is a video covering a couple of acupuncture points for knee pain to help reduce discomfort and pain in general. be aware that there are other points within the body to help, I have had needles stuck in my feet and hand and found relief from the pain. Can I explain this? Nope, but I know it works.

Dry Needling For Knee Pain

The more common treatment I get for my knee pain is dry needling through my tight areas. Quads and ITBS are common areas that are treated and I get significant relief. A lot of my knee pain comes from low soft tissue quality, repetitive jumping, and overall tiredness in the muscles. Dry needling is like a deep tissue massage in one go and can really get rid of a lot of trigger points very quickly. I swear by it and highly recommend it as an even more effective treatment than the traditional massage. I have had it done several ways, needles simply going in the trigger points, needles in the trigger points and then being spun (painful), crazy physios finding my trigger points with the needles and going in and out moving it around and trying to get that little ball released (very painful). This is very different to acupuncture, and often leaves me a little sorer directly after, but is by far my favourite treatment and one I turn to when I need quick release and pain relief.

These treatments are completely different and work on different principles. Dry needling is a direct soft tissue treatment used as an extension to massage, and acupuncture is a Chinese medicine approach. Knee pain sucks, so find out what works for you…. probably like me, a bit of both, coupled with exercises, soft tissue work and stretching. Get on it.

Illiopsoas: This is actually two separate muscles that we all know well as the hip flexors. Check out this post on tight hips to find out more about the problem that a tight psoas can cause. The psoas starts in the lower back and attaches to the femur, which is the thigh bone. The illiacus, the other muscle in this group attaches to the hip and the femur.

Rectus Femoris: Another big hip flexor, this is a long thin muscle that runs from the hip and attaches onto your shin bone, the tibia. It turns into the patellar tendon and is also part of the quadriceps group. Not only does it flex the hip it also extends the knee.

Tensor Fascia Latae: Otherwise known as the TFL and a little trouble maker, remember to get your tennis ball in there as it gets pretty tight. It is on the outside of the thigh, and starts at the pelvis and actually attaches to your tibia, which is a bone in your shin. It also works to abduct the thigh, and extends into the ITB, the illiotibial band, which if you do a quick search for you will find causes a lot of knee problems and gets tight easily. It is mostly made from fascia.

Sartorius: This is actually the longest muscle in your body and runs diagonally along the length of your thigh. Starting at the hip and attaches at your shin, it flexes the hip, abducts your leg, and rotate your thigh.

Pectineus: This muscle is very small and goes from the pubic bone to your femur. It is also an adductor of the thigh.