Arch/Heel Pain Strapping

So we’ve been talking about plantar heel pain and one of the treatment modalities that we talked about was strapping. You can have some very gratifying effects of simple strapping for plantar heel pain or plantar fasciitis and we’re going to have a look now at a very simple type of strapping that you will be able to apply at home. It is one of a number of different variations.  There’s dozens of different types of plantar heel pain strappings, but this is the most simple and probably the most easily effective strapping for you to be able to apply at home.

So one of the most common strapping techniques that we use in clinic is strapping to help with the plantar fascia for plantar fasciitis and arch type problems. So I’m just going to show you a very simple variation, there’s a number of different ways that it can be done. But I want to just keep this nice and simple so that you should be able to apply it at home.

So we put the foot in a slightly plantar flexed position like so and we put the first anchor strap around the metatarsals. It’s a good idea to put it on when the foot is nice and dry. And then what we do is we put our longitudinal straps on which run down in through here like that. So what these are essentially doing is they’re providing a false plantar fascia. So I’m just overlapping these by around about a third, round the back like so. And then what I do is we apply this is what provides the tension. So we’re just pushing up into there, there like that and wrapping that around.

Okay, and you’ll start to see the foot changing shape a little bit. I usually put a couple on, just like that. You can do wraparound straps as well, you can do figure of eight straps that wrap around the heel. There’s any number of different variations on this that you can do but this is probably the most simple variation of a plantar fascial strap that I know. And generally what we want to do to try to keep it on is we’ll use a little bit of me fix just to put it on, like so.

So that basic strapping will generally stay on pretty well for a couple of days. It will be quite tight to start off with but it will loosen up reasonably quickly depending on the type of strapping tape that you’ve used. And then I like to just finish that off with the last anchor that we’ve put around in through the back there like that. Okay, so a really simple but very effective plantar fascial slash arch pain strapping.