For runners, mobility is everything. To move fast and far requires full, pain-free, and low-resistance motion.
What if you stretch, foam roll, get massages, and hammer your legs with the strongest massage gun but still feel stiff, sore, heavy, or injury-laden? The issue might be closer than you think: in the surrounding fascia of the foot and lower leg.
Mobilizing this key fascial layer — a hugely important dimension of our running structure — may decrease aches and pains, improve chronic stiffness, and unlock our most optimal running stride.
Lower Leg and Foot Fascia: What, Where, and Why
Fascia is the continuous connective tissue that envelopes and connects large parts of your body. Like a sheet — or in the lower body, a sock — it can wrap around muscles, tendons, bones, joints, nerves, and blood vessels, keeping everything supported and connected.
In the lower leg and foot, we have two thin but powerful fascial structures:
- Crural fascia: wraps around the muscles of the lower leg, providing support and allowing for efficient movement
- Plantar fascia: spans the bottom of your foot, helping to absorb impact and maintain arch stability.
But like many parts of the runner’s body, this lower leg fascia has two jobs that are often at odds:
- Strength and energy transmission: envelopes and connects the working muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones and then transmits the energy they create into propulsion
- Mobility: allows some motion of the structures beneath it so that this powerful system can still flex, extend, drive, and push off — all the motions that create the running stride!
The fascia of the lower limbs must be kept mobile for an efficient running stride. Photo: iRunFar/Eszter Horanyi
Sticky and Stiff Fascia Consequences
If fascia loses mobility — due to repetitive or inefficient loading or simply dehydration, both commonplace in running — it can get stiff and tight, preventing lengthening and restricting mobility. Or fascia itself can become strained, as with injuries like plantar fasciitis.
But fascia can also become sticky, adhering to the tissues it surrounds. When this happens, it can restrict motion and prevent full contraction of the muscles beneath and within it. Lost muscle contractility may not only result in muscle pain and strain but also lost power and, potentially, lost speed and endurance.
Lastly, fascia is both expansive and interconnected. The plantar and crural fascia not only envelope the foot and lower leg, respectively, but they also connect to the rest of the leg, pelvis, and trunk.
What that means, and what I intend to demonstrate with the strategies below, is that fascial restrictions far away in the foot and lower leg can restrict motion in the hips, back, and beyond!
Plantar fasciitis occurs when the plantar fascia tissue becomes inflamed. Photo: Shutterstock
Fascial Mobility Needs Specificity
In a previous article, I dove deep into the fascial layers of the legs, how they need to move, and general strategies for moving fascia. To summarize, we need to be as specific as possible with our depth and direction to affect the best mobilization of fascia. In other words, if we wish to move a specific tissue, we need to know where it is, what direction it runs, and how deep it is.
For instance, the crural fascia of the lower leg is a thin sheet running lengthwise behind and around the calf and shin. Simply lying on a foam roller or jamming a massage gun perpendicular to a sore spot is unlikely to create a mobilizing effect.
For a clearer understanding, imagine I spilled an electrolyte drink all over myself mid-ultramarathon. That sugary water dries through my t-shirt, sticking the shirt to my skin. Adding force perpendicular to that stuck area — like smashing my hand on it — will not dislodge the stuck shirt; it might make it stick even more! To unstick the shirt, we have to apply force in a different direction.
Back to fascia! If we want to impart motion on fascial sheets, we must change our force direction and, at times, our tools. The rise of “scraping tools” is one such strategy. Tissue scraping, first popularized by the Graston Technique, imparts a relatively superficial force on the tissue at a low angle — nearly parallel to the fascial layers — using metal tools. What makes this successful may be less about the tool and more about the specific angle and depth that scraping affords.
The good news is that we runners don’t need expensive or scary-looking tools for fascial specificity. We already have two good tools: our hands.
Two Fascial Strategies: Toe Spreaders and the Sock Pull
Herein, we demonstrate two powerful foot and lower leg fascial self-mobilization strategies. They:
- utilize our own two hands
- apply specific mobilization force to the fascia
- result in substantial mobility gains locally and through the rest of the leg and even the low back.
The video below guides you through these exercises.
[Editor’s Note: If you can’t see the film above, you can watch it at this link.]
Pre-Testing
To assess stiffness and treatment efficacy, try some mobility pre-tests. They may include:
- Ankle dorsiflexion (calf stretch)
- Toe flexion, extension, and spreading
- Knee flexion (quadriceps stretch)
- Hip flexion and extension (runner’s lunge)
- Toe touch (lumbar standing flexion)
Toe Spreaders
To perform, sit comfortably with bare feet. Interlock the fingers of the opposite hand on the stretch foot. Depending on your stiffness, you may only be able to get your fingers partially into the toe spaces. Then, perform the following, with slow oscillations, for 30 to 60 seconds:
- Traction: Pull the toes away from the foot. You may combine traction with the other techniques.
- Toe flex and extend: Flex and extend the toes using your interlocked hand.
- Foot twists: Twist the foot inward (pronation) and outward (supination).
- Make a fist: With the other hand, grasp over the top of the interlocked hand and toes, then squeeze.
The author demonstrating the Toe Spreaders strategy. Photo: Joe Uhan
How This Works
The plantar fascia has powerful connections from the heel and foot, into each of the five toes. Spreading, then pulling, bending, and twisting the toes imparts a potent fascial mobilization to the plantar fascia.
Not only does it improve local motion at the foot and ankle, many experience significant mobility gains in the hip and low back after this technique.
Sock Pull
To perform, sit comfortably (ideally on the floor), with bare feet and lower legs. Then, perform several repetitions of the following:
- Posterior leg: Grasp your hands around the back of the ankle, just behind the ankle bones and over the Achilles tendon. Interlace fingers, lightly squeeze the hands together around the leg and pull upward, as if pulling up a very tight sock. Pump and/or circle the ankle. Allow the hands to slowly slide upward toward the knee.
- Medial and lateral calf and shin: Position the hands on the inner and outer shin and calf. Interlace, squeeze, and upward pull while ankle pumping and circling.
- Anterior leg: Position the hands on the front of the shin, with the fingers tightly interlaced. Squeeze hands together and upward pull while ankle pumping and circling.
- Reverse direction: Try the previous strategies in the reverse direction. Start high, just below the knee and slide downward while ankle pumping and circling.
- Experiment with your squeeze force: This will adjust how deeply the pull is applied to the lower leg fascia.
- Try seated with straight legs: This adds neuro-fascial (sciatic nerve) tension, and will accentuate the stretch effect.
The author demonstrating the Sock Pull strategy. Photo: Joe Uhan
How This Works
The Sock Pull strategy glides the layers of lower-leg fascia parallel to the muscles and bones of the lower leg. They often get stuck in this direction and the up and down pull, combined with ankle pumping and circling, helps facilitate greater mobility of the fascial layers.
Final Thoughts
Fascial self-mobilization of the foot and lower leg is a novel strategy that may do more than restore and improve mobility to the foot, ankle, and calf. It could be the key to solving stubborn stiffness elsewhere in the leg and even the lower back.
So warm up your hands and push, pull, twist, and slide your toes, feet, and lower legs to see what mobility breakthroughs await.
Call for Comments
- Do you ever feel like you have mobility issues in your lower legs and feet?
- Have you tried these mobilization techniques? How did you get on?
