It is often noticed that many people complain about their feet hurting sorely at a specific place rather than in its entirety. This often has a lot to do with you suffering from a medical condition called Plantar Fasciitis.
We will discuss it further onwards, but for starters, Plantar Fasciitis is a striking pain an individual feels right up in the morning, which takes its time and reduces over the day depending on your activities.
An optimum pair of footwear is a necessity for someone who has Plantar Fasciitis.
However, there are several other things that you can do as well to reduce the pain temporarily or permanently. But let’s be real. Permanent treatments are often surgery-based, and not everyone can afford one.
Therefore we use ACE Bandages which are thick bands proving to be excellent shock absorbers and offering fine arch support to your feet.
Before we jump into ACE Bandage technology to understand how to wrap the foot for Plantar Fasciitis with an ACE bandage, let’s become familiar with Plantar Fasciitis.
What is Plantar Fasciitis?
Plantar Fasciitis is a well-known irritating torment in your feet that you feel as you get up in the first part of the day. It generally focuses on the whole territory around your heel and tends to improve progressively over the day.
It’s certain to worsen if you strain yourself or your work requests you to be on your feet more often than not.
Plantar Fasciitis is a pain in the fascial band or tendon that runs from the lower part of the calcaneus to the base of the toes. It helps uphold the long curve of the foot inclined to tear that later outcome in a ton of heel pain.
To hint a specific explanation behind tendon tear would be an off-base articulation on the grounds. But there are different purposes for it.
Also, it can deteriorate after some time if not managed at early disclosure.
What are the Symptoms of Plantar Fasciitis?
Unlike some other foot pains, Plantar Fasciitis does not develop in an unnoticeable environment where we are unable to identify it by feelings and sensations. It’s anything but difficult to recognize as it is felt in the heel region or along the longitudinal curve.
Some noticeable manifestations show up the second your feet contact the ground. From the start, you might not have any desire to put the feet to the ground; however, as you do, you feel these symptom(s) quickly getting to you:
- Intense, quick pain in the heel’s back.
- The sore and rigid heels make you unable to walk at all, often.
- A fiery sensation burning up all around your feet.
- You notice your feet swelling up in an obvious state with unbearable pain.
Effects of Plantar Fasciitis
Plantar Fasciitis serves as a routinely stabbing pain every morning in your heel, but it noticeably decreases as your day passes by. Though, standing for an extended timeframe surely affects your feet’ frame and gets worse than what you feel in the morning.
Plantar Fasciitis is caused by many reasons, including ligament tears with each case being different. Suffering from Plantar Fasciitis may be a common situation, but it’s highly recommended to seek a doctor immediately even so as it can affect your daily life.
People who suffer from this continue to feel miserable as walking and running feel like an impossible task for them with their pain feeling like feet being hammered down to the ground.
What Causes Plantar Fasciitis?
Foot injuries are most often associated with women. According to statistics, women are more likely to suffer from Plantar Fasciitis.
One of the biggest reasons for that is the type of fashionable footwear they wear to look good and fashionable.
It’s often seen how high the heels are which automatically affects their fascia ligaments and ruins their posture.
Additionally, as much as sportswomen involved in dance and gymnastics are prone to ruining their feet, men are too. It would be unethical to be biased about that.
All sportsperson that requires a lot of jumping around is prone to a bad landing that is very likely to damage their feet. Similarly, people whose work environment requires long hours of being on feet are one of the biggest targets of Plantar Fasciitis as well.
People who are prone to suffer from a debilitating condition of Plantar Fasciitis if they are associated with any of the following:
- Uphill walking
- Excessive steps for climbing
- Wearing worn-out shoes with thin soles
- Being ignorant to warm-up before exercise
- Having too much weight
- Having uneven arches
- Long hours of standing
Treatment Plans Available for Plantar Fasciitis
With this growing popularly and varying for most people, many treatment plans have been proven to be beneficial that include icing and anti-inflammatory medicines usage, using braces, home treatment, and ergonomic shoes.
All the common methods may likely reduce your pain significantly. Still, if it persists, there are some treatment plans like physical therapy, extracorporeal shock wave therapy, or usage of a corticosteroid injection that can prove to have very impactful results.
By far, the most common and economic treatment plan is wrapping your foot with an ACE bandage.
Regardless of the treatment being temporary, it’s likely to be very effective. One of the issues that people face though is how to wrap the foot for Plantar Fasciitis with ACE Bandage, and we provide a detailed guideline for that.
Different Ways to Wrap Foot with ACE Bandage
ACE Bandages differ from normal bandages and require a proper guideline to follow through to wrap certain body parts. But here, we’re especially going to discuss how to wrap the foot for Plantar Fasciitis with ACE Bandage.
Ensure You Start with The Ball
It’s often a misconception followed by people that the most optimal way to wrap your foot is by initiating from the widest part of the foot with the most surface area. Make sure that you begin to wrap under the big toe and carefully try covering it all over the foot.
Overlapping Is the Key to Perfect Bandaging
ACE personally recommends overlapping as a necessity. As you start wrapping the bandage, each layer should be overlapping the previous one by half of the width. It’s also essential that it remains smooth and even; hence, there shouldn’t be any gaps.
Keep the Bandage Sitting Low On Ankle
When treating the foot’s sole, don’t overdo it when it comes to covering. If you’re treating the sole instead of the ankle, you should stop covering when you reach two-thirds of the heel. This allows the bandage to be sitting low on the ankle instead of being wrapped all over.
Use Snap Fastener for Closure
It’s possible you can easily close the bandage by elastic clips or self-adhering type. But ACE now provides an innovative closure property with snap fasteners that ensure your wrapping finishes off far easier than with clips or tapes.
Video Credit: Youtube/Dr. Ray McClanahan
Alternate ACE Bandage Wrapping Method
For some people, using the original method provided by ACE might not be easy to work with or it doesn’t bring them enough comfort. Hence, they provided an alternate wrapping method as well.
Begin the Same as Original
Initially, you should start the same way as guided in the first technique. Remember that your bandaging must always start at the ball of the foot right under the toes.
Wrap All Around the Heel
This method differs from here. Unlike the original method, in the alternate method, continue to the heel all the way and bandage throughout the heel.
Reach to Your Smallest Toe
After you’ve wrapped around properly all around the heal area and covered your foot, roll it enough to reach the point where you started from. It would be best if you now were under your littlest toe. Now, bring the ACE bandage to the top of your foot.
Form a Criss-Cross Shape
As you’ve reached the top of your foot, you’re not about to finish and wrap it up. Continue to go below your foot from there as to make a criss-cross shape in such a way that the bandage crosses must be made in the center of Plantar Fasciitis and fasten it there.
What Can Wrapping Do For You?
One thing you need to be aware of is that wrapping your foot with an ACE bandage is not a condition reversing solution. Its main purpose is to reduce the pain caused by Plantar Fasciitis temporarily.
However, it might work remarkably when it is combined with other methods.
Wrapping your foot must always be seen as a helpful substitute and a quick fix. In addition to that, wrapping your foot provides you with a better footing which reduces the force and shock on your feet that leads to worsening pain in the heel of your foot.
Therefore, it’s considered to be a good practice when you apply to tap and wrapping around your foot regularly.
There’s no doubt wrapping your foot will make walking easier, but you should still be lenient with yourself and go easy on your footing.
Is Wrapping Worth It?
As long as you consider wrapping to be a means of reducing your pain to a certain extent or as a temporary solution, it’s all good like that. Wrapping your foot with an ACE bandage serves as a force reducer and as an anti-shock to a certain point as well. It has a significant effect in reducing your foot pain, but it shouldn’t be considered as your prime method to get rid of Plantar Fasciitis. There are a certain number of remedies, methods, and therapies that are said to be a legitimate treatment for Plantar Fasciitis unlike wrapping with ACE bandage.
How it Works
Wrapping your foot with an ACE bandage allows you to stabilize the fascia ligaments of your foot due to which you feel the fascia pain. When you wrap your foot properly with an ACE bandage, it works by restricting the movements of your fascia to a certain level which keeps your foot be at rest and not strain a particular part of your feet.
This method is applied vastly in sports events to prevent straining. Athletes wrap bandages around their feet and wrists to ensure their ligaments and tendons are restricted.
With such restructure, they build a posture that immobilizes the chances of unnecessary movements that can worsen the pain.
When you install limitations to the movement of fascia, the abnormal movement or extensive stretching is omitted, which works wonders as it prevents any tears development in the tissues.
It’s because of these tears and their inability to reinstate that the fascia pain worsens over time and affects your ability to move and run drastically.
When you wrap your foot with an ACE bandage, ensure that your feet remain dry and clean before wrapping. In the same way, if you wash your feet, try to ignore using any moisturizing soap or liquids and creams that keep your foot’s surface greasy or slippery.
This hinders in letting the ACE bandage to maintain its best shape, which later can cause a lot of itchiness at the bottom of the footing.
Have Your RICE with MICE
For the people who’ve been in a long-term relationship with accidents, bruises, strains, and sprains, and other relatable conditions they are all very much familiar with the acronym “RICE” which stands for Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation.
While there’s nothing wrong with this procedure for recovery, when it comes to Plantar Fasciitis, the acronym is improvised.
RICE alternates to MICE where the M stands for Massage. The tearing of tendons and tissues causes plantar Fasciitis. It’s obvious that such tearing isn’t a piece of cake for regeneration and gets better quickly.
However, you must continue to put efforts into maintaining the development and even accelerate it. Using MICE, you are substituted with Massage rather than rest and let the condition heal on its own.
Conclusion
To think Plantar Fasciitis can be treated at home is not a bad thought. It is possible to treat Plantar Fasciitis at home. With the ACE bandages providing intense compression, it is one of the best possible ways available to combat such foot conditions.
However, it’s necessary to keep in mind that using ACE bandages is a short-term solution. It shouldn’t be considered as a primal method for recovery.
It may relieve you of pain and swelling, but when not done properly and incorporated together with other treatment methods, it could become very severe.
What should also be taken into consideration is that, while Plantar Fasciitis has become a common condition, it doesn’t mean the severity of the symptoms remains the same for everyone, too.