The plantar fascia: durable but not flexible
Your foot’s plantar fascia, the dense, durable band of connective tissue which runs from your heel to the base of your toes, has maintained its integrity for years and years of your lifetime. The average person takes 5,000 to 12,000 steps daily. Many of these steps are on hard, unforgiving surfaces, and each step puts a force on the feet that is about one and a half times that person’s body weight. When running, your feet withstand more than three times this force. From childhood to adulthood, the plantar fascia has endured all this, held its own, and helped you stand, walk, and run.
Yet despite its rugged nature, the plantar fascia has a marked weakness. It lacks flexibility. The plantar fascia is made of collagen, and collagen is not very elastic. So even though the plantar fascia is pretty tough, when it is subjected to impact, stresses, and strains, it does not stretch to any great extent and then bounce back. Instead, the force it weathers from this repetitive trauma causes tiny tears to form along its surface. These micro-tears will eventually heal, if allowed to do so. But if the abuse continues without rest or remedy, your feet have no chance to recover from the existing tears. With unrelenting trauma, bad things can happen. The micro-tears can increase. The collagen of which the plantar fascia is composed degenerates. Inflammation of the plantar fascia follows and remains. The inflammation then causes soreness, and in some cases debilitating pain.
Tags: plantar fascia