The Barefoot Therapist

Sometimes...take a moment to PAWS 🐾

One thing that’s guaranteed to be waiting for me on a Monday morning, is a bunch of messages or emails from clients/athletes who are in pain post race / training or activity from the weekend.

For some, they’ve carried injury through a training plan and now that the race is done, they want to address the issue.

For the majority of the others, they’ve experienced pain during or immediately post race or heavy training session and are worried it will affect future plans.

Even in day to day life, 'over use' in any physical activity with more free time over a weekend, folk may feel it.

Often my first reply is “tell me what you did over the last few days?”

If the answer is a major race or really big training block, I tell them to wait and watch for a few days and to get back to me if things don’t settle.

If the answer is a mega attack on household chores, the garden, or DIY, I will ask them to wait to see if it settles.

Very few end up needing to book in.

Soreness, fatigue, transient pain and discomfort are so common in endurance sports, and day to day life exertions.

99% will ease off naturally without needing specific assessment or intervention.

If symptoms persist, I will book you in for a treatment and assess you then.

Sometimes take a moment to PAWS 🙏
SydSnippets #,BeMoreLikeSyd

The seven wonders of the world:
To see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to feel, to laugh, to love. ....❤💜🧡💛💚💙
Oh.......and can all be combined by an early morning run in a beautiful place, with your thoughts free to flow in any direction !👣👣👣😉
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Battery....🔋🏃‍♀️📈📉

I speak to many ultra runners pre their long solo or multi day races focussing on managing energy through the event.

Most think it’s about replacing fuelling and energy, but we simply cannot do that how we want or think we can, so I use an analogy about the phone battery to help shape their thinking.

The conversation shouldn’t be about “How do I keep my energy levels up?” but more around “How do I control the rate at which I spend a finite resource?”

You’re not trying to keep or fill the battery back upto 100%. You’re trying to make sure there’s enough battery left for what the day or days still demand.

At the start of an ultra, imagine your body is a phone leaving home with a full charge.

From the moment you start, the battery is going down. That is normal. Eating, drinking and pacing intelligently don't recharge you back to 100%; they help manage the rate of depletion and preserve your ability to keep producing useful work.

And importantly, distance travelled doesn't necessarily predict battery used.

You might reach 50 km of a 100 km race with 65% remaining. Another runner might have 35%. Same distance. Very different energy cost.

Your screen brightness is intensity. Turn it up too high early because you feel fantastic, and you're paying for it all day.

Your GPS/navigation is terrain. Steep climbs, technical descents, mud, altitude and difficult footing can quietly increase the cost of every kilometre.

Your data roaming is the environment. Heat, cold, humidity and altitude can create additional physiological costs in the background.

Your apps running in the background are all the things consuming resources without necessarily making you faster: poor movement economy, unnecessary surges, carrying excess kit, inadequate conditioning, stress, poor sleep, GI problems, even repeatedly chasing other runners.

And fuel and hydration are simply power management, not a magical charger. They support continued work and can slow the deterioration in performance, but they don't erase accumulated fatigue.

Sometimes your phone goes from 70% to 50% much faster than expected. That's an ultra.

Rather than immediately thinking “I'm having a bad day” ask: What's draining the battery?

Maybe you've been running the climbs you planned to walk. Maybe the temperature has risen. Maybe you've stopped eating because your stomach feels poor. Maybe you've spent two hours unconsciously matching somebody else's pace. Maybe the technical terrain is costing considerably more than the distance suggests.

Then you have the ultra equivalent of low-power mode.

Walk the climb. Reduce pace. Cool yourself. Sort the fuelling problem. Stop racing the person ahead. Spend longer at the aid station if there's a problem worth fixing. Change the strategy before the battery warning becomes critical.

That isn't necessarily failure or weakness. It's resource management.

Multi-day ultras make the analogy even better.

For a single-stage ultra, the question is: How much battery do I need left for the final third?

For a multi-day event, it becomes: How much battery can I afford to use today without compromising tomorrow?

And unlike a phone, overnight recovery doesn't necessarily restore you to 100%.

You might start:

Day 1: 100% → 55%
Recover overnight → Day 2: 82%
Finish Day 2 → 43%
Recover → Day 3: 68% etc etc …..

That accumulated deficit changes the strategy. The athlete who repeatedly empties the battery trying to maximise each individual day may progressively reduce what they have available for subsequent stages.

The battery percentage isn't just about energy stores. It's a metaphor for your overall capacity to sustain the task: metabolic resources, muscular fatigue and damage, thermoregulation, hydration, GI tolerance, cognitive fatigue, motivation and other interacting constraints.

And different systems can become the limiting factor at different times.

You could effectively have 60% battery remaining but an app has crashed — your legs are capable of continuing, but nausea means you can't fuel properly. Or metabolically you're okay, but repeated descending has created enough local muscular fatigue that running is becoming disproportionately expensive.

That's why good ultra management isn't simply “eat X grams of carbohydrate per hour and hold X pace.”

It's repeatedly asking: How quickly am I draining? What's causing that drain? What's coming next? And what can I change now to make sure the battery lasts until I actually need it?

The best ultra runners aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest battery. They're often the ones who understand when to spend it, when to conserve it, and what is draining it.

Great analogy that can be applied to many aspects of your life...not just running🔋🏃‍♀️📉📈
Thanks The Endurance Physio for the wisdom 👌🫶👏

🧠🪥⚖️✅️
You brush your teeth every single morning.
Two minutes, same counter, same mirror.

What if those two minutes were quietly rebuilding something your last checkup completely missed?

It's not about balance.
It's about whether six systems in your brain and body are still talking to each other.

Here's what's happening in those ten seconds when you stand on one foot.
Your inner ear, your joint sensors, your eyes, your cerebellum, your muscles, and your thinking brain all fire at once, in parallel, like an orchestra that has to play in perfect sync.

Balance is the only thing that requires all six instruments at the same time.
Strength only needs a few. Walking speed barely changes with age at all.
But balance drops like a cliff after sixty, not a slope.

And one brain-imaging study found that people who could not hold a single-leg stance for twenty seconds were significantly more likely to have silent blood vessel damage inside the brain. No symptoms. No warning. Just a wobble.

Researchers followed adults fifty-one to seventy-five for seven years. Those who failed a ten-second single-leg stance had nearly double the risk of dying from any cause.

The smallest place to start?
Stand on one foot while you brush your teeth tonight. Ten seconds per side. Your counter is right there.

I know many of you already do this, although worth the reminder thank you Dr. Laurie Marbas 👌⚖️👏

Injury? So the big question of Ice or no Ice? 🧊🤔

In 2019, Ice lost its place in the injury management protocol, which then formed the latest acronym: PEACE & LOVE (Protection, Elevation, Avoid Anti-Inflammatory Drugs, Compression, Education & Load, Optimism, Vascularisation and Exercise).

Useful! 👍👌 If you want to keep the acronym shorter you could save the 'love' for after you've applied the protocol of 'peace' 😉😁🙏❤️

🧊
UKrunchat

Well said Bartold Clinical, I've observed the injuries caused by footwear in junior footballers.

A classic case of shift the load from one area and put it to another. And more ammo on why football boots need a radical overhaul!
High-Collar Football Boots Trade Ankle Sprains for Knee Torsional Load — and Female-Specific Boots Run Hotter on Traction
Ever been asked "What is best, high or low-cut footy boots"? I have, often.
But really, this is just football missing the point once more...
A PRISMA 2020 systematic review (Sports Medicine – Open, 2026) searched Elsevier, EBSCO, Web of Science, PubMed Central and Footwear Science for 2005–2025, screened studies by dual reviewers, and assessed quality with the PEDro scale, landing on 32 included studies on football boot design and non-contact lower-limb injury risk.
Stud pattern and geometry were found to govern rotational traction at the boot-surface interface (of course).
High-collar boot constructions, designed to enhance ankle stability, did limit ankle range of motion and reduce sprain incidence...
BUT came with a compensatory increase in knee torsional loading, raising knee-joint injury risk.
Separately, female-specific boot models showed systematically higher anterior-posterior traction than male models, exposing female players to greater torsional load at the ankle during stop-and-cut movements — a plausible contributor to the higher observed rate of female non-contact ankle injuries.
Will we EVER get this right?
Why This Matters to You
This is a genuine "fix one joint, load another" finding — useful for boot-selection conversations with football-code patients where ankle history and knee history point in different directions.
The female-specific traction finding also gives a footwear-side explanation to sit alongside the usual anatomical/hormonal framing of the female ACL/ankle injury gap.
Commentary: This is a synthesis across heterogeneous study designs and boot models spanning two decades — the ankle-to-knee trade-off is a consistent pattern across the pooled literature, not a single definitive trial, and the authors themselves call for longitudinal studies to quantify injury incidence across boot designs directly.
Me.. I am calling for a complete overhaul with major disruption to football boot design!

Diana Palin

*Shoulder Alert* 💪

Whilst helping a client with a shoulder injury, I found this link to be helpful, therefore by sharing, it might help one of you. 🙏💪 👇

➡️ LOOKING FOR SHOULDER BAND EXERCISES TO STRENGTHEN OR REHAB YOUR SHOULDERS AND ROTATOR CUFF?

➡️ DO YOU HAVE PAIN IN YOUR SHOULDERS THAT YOU WANT TO ALLEVIATE?

✅ THIS ARTICLE HAS YOU COVERED WITH 7 ESSENTIAL ROTATOR CUFF BAND EXERCISES THAT WILL BULLETPROOF YOUR SHOULDERS

Nb Always free free to add a sea swim to the equitation, great resistance and shoulder movement training 💪🌊💙


UKrunchat

Click here for more info ⤵️ https://www.setforset.com/blogs/news/7-rotator-cuff-resistance-bands-exercises-for-rehab-prehab-and-strengthening

RETURNING FROM INJURY?
Some thoughts to share .......Best way to get back into running after injury/time off ? What have you tried and worked?

As a starter, I thought I would share mine....👣👣👣👣👉

✅When you can walk for 40mins pain free, the first run I always default to is
✅1 min run, 1 min walk x 10. Gentle, using style and grace 😊.
✅Obviously a 10min walk to warm up, and 10min walk to cool down.


RunWednesdays

What's your return from injury approach❓
Feel free to share....

Please note the photo 📸 is eight years old! Not THE recent one! 🙏 😁