Ouch!

your foot hurts.

Too much. Too much to exercise. Too  much to stand on it even. A lot of us let our plantar fascia and metatarsal (foot bones) pain get really bad before we actually listen to our body and seek help. Its so bad that you really can’t do any of the standing functional exercises your body so desperately needs. Research shows that one of the best ways to train balance is to do “functional” exercises. You see, foot and ankle balance is about building coordination. Essentially its a feedback loop between what you feel with your foot on the ground, and control you are able to execute.

But when you stand, you put pressure on those painful areas and your arch collapses. This puts strain on your plantar fascia, pressure on your metatarsals, and can even compromise that unstable swollen ankle that isn’t healed yet. If you can’t yet do standing exercise yet, what do you do? rest? I’d like to think that you’ve read Anatomy for Runners – and learned that rest doesn’t help any tissue improve its resiliency. In fact, rest makes things weaker. So what do you do?

Enter the AFX: Ankle Foot maXimizer

note: this pic is a registered TM of AFX. 

The AFX is a one stop shop to get those foot muscles firing again. It comes with different level resistance for beginners, and more advanced athletes. It comes with a DVD full of instructional exercises, and even offers a 1-on-1 consult to help ensure that you are doing the exercise correctly (try getting that from another company trying to sell you an exercise device!)

If you read the Day 3 post, you know that all running athletes should have a rocker board as an integral part of their home gym. But like we said above, when you aren’t ready for standing exercises yet,  you need to get a leg up and get moving.  And the AFX is a great tool to have for you, or your runner struggling with foot and lower leg injuries.

Remember: your body can, and will, improve!