“Everything you knew about muscle is wrong” is a fantastic article by Christopher McDougall in the October 09 issue of Men’s Health. It is lengthy and detailed but it explains clearly how your muscle fascia is responsible for much of the power (and sometimes pain) in your movement. Just reading the article will make you sit up straighter as you begin to understand how posture is created. This is a must read for anyone with chronic knee/back/foot pain they’ve struggled to cure or anyone who’s ever wondered why it’s sometimes the light, skinny guys who can punch the fastest or bowl the furthest. Plus read how our own Lee Saxby (Wildfitness’s Technical Director responsible for the core of our course programme) solves Chris’s long-term heel pain conundrum in one session!
Read the article “Everything you knew about muscle is wrong” here.
If you’d like to read more from Chris, and especially if you are a running enthusiast or interested in knowing more about barefoot running, we also recommend you check out his book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall.
I thought this was an interesting article. However, there was no followup to see if the changes stuck.
Did Chris have to keep doing the squat exercise? Did the heel pain return?
Matt – good point! We’ll try and talk to Lee and Chris over the next week and get back to you.
Hi Matt, I know Chris has now left a response on your blog, but for others who are interested, here’s Chris’s answer:
cmcdougall said…
great question, matt, and thanks for digesting the article so thoroughly.
coincidentally, i was recently listening to the recording i made of my interview with lee saxby when he cured my PF. you should hear the amazement in my voice; i’m almost stammering with disbelief. not at what lee was doing — at what I was doing without knowing it.
here’s the back story:
when i came down with plantar fasciitis, i was in the midst of writing “born to run,” and i was convinced that after studying the tarahumara and techniques like pose, chi and evolution running, i’d mastered perfect running form. i thought i’d never be injured again — and yet i was. so once again, i made the same round of visits to podiatrists, massage therapists and sports medicine physicians, and once again was given the same useless advice (night splint, stretch your calves, roll your foot on a golf ball…)
BUT NONE OF THEM — and this is so important, it deserves double all-caps — NONE OF THEM EVER ASKED TO SEE ME RUN.
Lee Saxby did. that’s the first thing he did. he took me outside, then videotaped me as I ran up and run down the street. when he played the tape back, i was astonished to see that instead of landing on my forefoot, i was coming down on my heel. and instead of keeping my back straight and feet under my hips, i was leaning waaaaaayyy back and striding way out past my center of gravity.
ugh. it was horrible.
it didn’t take long to figure out what happened. that past winter, we’d had a burst of snow back home in pennsylvania. since i believed i had mastered Tarahumara-style running, i thought i could get away with wearing a thick, warm, cushioned shoe. i started running in the nike vomeros, the shoe equivalent of an escalade. i didn’t realize it, but the shoes were so plush that i could no longer tell which part of my foot was hitting the ground. bit by bit, my running form went to hell. i was backsliding to my awful old technique, and totally unaware of it.
so what was lee’s cure?
first, the overhead squats with the 12-pound bar. the purpose of the bar is to force honest, upright posture. if you don’t stack your joints properly and come straight up-and-down, the bar will make you wobble and force you to kick out a foot for balance. when you can go all the way down to a full squat and back up again without moving your feet, you know your ankles, hips, shoulders and head are all in erect alignment.
and so?
so that means you have to get off your heels and up on your toes to execute the squat, which stretches the plantar fascia between the arch and heel. forget all that nonsense podiatrists tell you about stretching the calf; PF has NOTHING to do with the calf. it has EVERYTHING to do with the plantar fascia in the foot. i had this explained to me by Dr. Robert Schleip, head of the world-reknowned Fascia Research Clinic at Germany’s Ulm University. Schleip himself suffered from plantar fasciitis. and his cure? running barefoot through the parks of Berlin. “when you run in bare feet, you get a deep stretch in your foot that’s hard to accomplish any other way,” Schleip told me.
and that brings me to the final part of Lee’s Saxby’s Miraculous PF Cure:
lose the shoes.
after the squats and some rope-skipping (which also drives a deep stretch into your arch), lee took me back outside for some barefoot running drills. lee is one of the best POSE method teachers in the world, probably second only to dr. romanov himself, and it didn’t take him long to sharpen up my posture and correct my foot-strike. that afternoon, i went for a long barefoot through hyde park. it felt sensational. since then, i’ve never put on a running shoe — and never felt a twinge of heel pain again.
so my analysis? i think the overhead squats immediately relieved the irritation by stretching the fascia, and my subsequent maintenance has come from running in bare feet, usually about 50-70 miles a week. it’s been over a year, and my legs feel awesome.
see Matt’s blog entry here – http://www.mattmetzgar.com/matt_metzgar/2009/11/fascia-ii.html
This article was pretty informative. At comment no. one above, I agree with what you said but its a fairly banal point. How often do you post to your blog? I’ve bookmarked this site and gave you a digg, hope to read more soon!