Soft-Tissue Work and Recovery Modalities

If you aren’t accustomed to being barefoot, your feet and calves will naturally be sore and stiff following barefoot training. It takes time to adapt! But there are some things you can do to help yourself to progress more quickly, and recover faster.

Probably the “weakest” muscles in your feet will be the intrinsic muscles on the bottom of your foot. These muscles hardly have to work at all in stiff, heavily-padded shoes. So let’s go from the ground up!

Every day, find some time to stand up and roll the bottom of your foot on a tennis ball. Start with very light pressure, and move the entire length of your foot with the ball. After a couple of swipes, try increasing the pressure a little bit. Once you’ve gotten the bottom of your foot nice and warmed up, and hopefully a little looser, do some focus work with the ball.

Place the tennis ball under your heel, and apply a significant amount of pressure for a couple of seconds. Let off, and repeat a few times. Repeat this heavy-pressure/light-pressure focus work on the instep or middle of your foot, and on the ball of the foot. After that, get the ball up under your toes and grasp it with your toes. Let the toes relax and roll the sole of the foot toward the floor, stretching the toes out across the ball. Repeat as many times as you’d like!

Self-myofascial release (SMR), also known as “foam rolling” is also really helpful for any athlete, and especially for the barefoot newbie! If you’ve never done it before, start with one of the white rolls. They’re much softer than the black foam rolls. The best way to use a foam roll is to roll the entire length of the muscle, from one tendon to the next, but not onto the joint itself. Starting at the calf, roll back and forth from ankle to knee.

When you hit a spot that’s especially tender, it’s probably a “knot” (unless it’s a bruise, in which case, don’t roll over that!). Sit on the knot for up to thirty seconds, and breathe into it. Focus on allowing the muscle to release. Roll across the muscle some more and see how it feels. Continue for as long as you like.

When you get up to the hips, you can do some great foam roll and tennis ball work to release the muscles of the hip - especially the glutes and external rotators. Sit on the foam roll with your feet on the ground and knees bent. Cross one ankle over the opposite leg (like you’re sitting in a chair with your leg crossed), and lean over onto the glute (your butt muscle) on the side of the crossed leg (not the one with the foot still flat on the ground). Roll back and forth across the length of the glute, and lean over more or less to get different aspects of the muscle. After you’ve done that on both sides and feel pretty loose, try it with a tennis ball!

Everybody—regardless of if they’re running—should be doing soft tissue work. The foam roll and tennis ball compress the tissues, thereby allowing fresh blood to be drawn in.

When you consistently fire your muscles, the muscle fibers slide. When you get a micro trauma, a small tear, one of the fibers can stick, it can’t slide anymore. The foam roll across that tissue breaks that up and lets the tissues slide again. A knot is a denser bit of interwoven material. When there is an entry into the muscle fibers, the metabolic products of your blood and tissue begin to build there. When that happens the tissue can’t function and becomes a place of stagnation. You’ll feel them when you use a roll under or on the side of your legs and you hit the tender spots. It sometimes takes 1 or 2 weeks before the adhesion breaks up.

Tennis balls are a bit denser and more focused; they’re great for the bottom of the foot. Surprisingly, the bottoms of barefoot runners’ feet can actually be suppler and softer than the bottoms of those who wear shoes because shoes fix your feet into one position. Since the foot can’t fully flex or open its toes it becomes more rigid.

If you’ve previously done muscular work, you may have existing micro trauma in some areas. Jamming on those tissues with the foam roll or tennis ball may end up making you feel slightly sorer than before. For this reason, it’s good to do soft tissue work before a run in the beginning. Think of it as the opposite of stretching (except for alignment and dynamic stretches done beforehand). The foam roll will be better immediately before or between 6-8 hours after the run once the body has had a chance to recuperate. This should help alleviate some of the pain a foam roll or tennis ball may add if you’ve had previous muscle trauma.