I have no evidence, but it sure seems like it should help. A muscle can be strong and have poor leverage and therefore not produce as much moment as another person. This the reason that I tell patients, especially weekend wariors, to start slowly and build into the duration of their activity.Ĭraig's point about defining weakness is a good one. The activity caused strengthening of the muscle. Then a hike a few days later would not cause the soreness. My posterior tibial muscle would be sore the next couple of days. I would take my kid for a hike with him in a back pack. However, if the pathology is at the 1st MPJ additional compression from muscle contraction may not help the MPJ.Īs I have gotten older, I have noticed loss of strength seems to occur more quickly. When the abductor hallucis contracts there will be a smaller need for tension in the fascia.
The abductor hallucis has essentially the same origin and insertion as the plantar fascia. If the plantar fascia resists arch flattening then any other muscle that reisits arch flattening could take stress off of the fascia. How many take into account the STJ/rearfoot axis when doing inversion/eversion strength testing? A 'weaker' muscle may just have a poor lever arm, due to normal individual variations of the joint axis - the muscle may actually be quite strong, so what use is strengthening?Ĭlick to expand.Tissue stress. To complicate things further, often when a muscle 'weakness' is identified, is it really weak or just has a poor lever arm to the axis of rotation of the joint. My argument is basically, that the instrinsics do not fire until weight starts to off load from the heel (ie late midstance), so strengthening is not going to have any influnce on events that occur prior to then. Take someone with tight calf muscles - the tibia has to move over the leg during gait, if it can't, then the mid foot collapses (pronates) - does not matter how strong the muscles are, the tibia still has to move over the foot etc etcĪs for the intrinsics, we had some discussion here. Take a pronated foot due to forefoot varus - does not matter how strong the muscles are, that medial column has to get to the ground. The problem is, how often is a weakness a cause of the problem? Intuiton would suggest that strengthening exercises are good thing to do anyway and exercises would be definitely good if a weakness was the cause of the problem. so not sure how strengthening muscles would help here as weakness is not apparent and the muscles are working hard anyway. Gray (? year) showed that the leg muscles are more active in those with flat feet. Basmajian et al (1963) showed that the muscles did not play a role in the support of the medial longitudinal arch. Weakness of inversion strength has been shown not to be associated with a pronated foot (Snook, 2001).