Getting Back To Running After A Walking Boot

First, walking boots are amazing for many, many things. Not comfort, not style. Those are not what they’re wonderful for. They are wonderful at helping you off weight your bone or your ligaments to allow them time to heal. It makes it so your muscles do not have to do a whole lot of work so they’re not pulling out a bone in case of a fracture. They are allowing that ligament, whether it was surgically repaired or it was overstretched and it just needed time to shrink up and to be stable again.

So that’s what those walking boots are for. So many times when you’re coming out of a walking boot, you’ve been dealing with an orthopedic surgeon and they will send you home with maybe some exercises you can do on a sheet of paper or some general guidelines on what you should and shouldn’t do.

Then the day comes where they tell you, you get to get out of that boot. You’re like, but what does that really mean? Do I just get to throw the boot away? Do I have to keep it? Do I wear it? Some of the time, not all the time. For some people they don’t really get a whole lot of answers from the orthopedic surgeon, and that’s not to pick on anybody, but that just seems to be what I deal with, is that they don’t give very specific answers to those questions.

So they’re handed this sheet of paper and they’re told that they can resume normal activities and they can go about their day. When you walk out, you’re so excited that they told you you can let go of that boot. You completely forgot to ask All of those questions. That happens to all of us.

So now you’re stuck at your house by yourself trying to figure out how you get back to running because the moment they told you that you could get out of that boot, you had images of walking in the park, getting back to your light jogging, just going about how you were before you got stuck in that boot. Then the reality strikes and you take the boot off and you stand and you’re like, holy biscuits. It’s uncomfortable to stand, it’s really uncomfortable to walk.

Why on earth do I have a limp? Why does my foot swell all the time? How much pain is okay? He told me I could walk. How far can I actually walk? Is it just around my house? Is it at the park? Do I have to do it on the treadmill? I have all these questions and I have no idea where to get these answers.

The internet is just overloaded with information, hence my video. Anyway it’s very confusing and when you’ve come out of a walking boot and everything is healed as far as the surgeon’s concerned you get a surgeon or orthopedic surgeon whether you had a surgery or you didn’t, just for clarification.

Oftentimes when you’re getting a boot, you are dealing with some form of orthopedic person and they’ve released you. What that means is that the tissue that was damaged, whether that was your bone, a ligament, whether you had screws put in it, whatever the reason for the walking boot, all of that has been resolved.

So if you aren’t told to go someplace else, a lot of people get very confused. Like you’re not suggested to go to a specialist, right? Then you get very confused as to what you do first to make your ankle better because it’s stiff, it still swells, it’s still uncomfortable, it’s not the original ankle I had before I had the injury. This is still uncomfortable and still to a certain point, injured, right?

As far as we’re thinking because not being injured is being able to do all the things that we want to do. That is where seeing a specialist like myself is important. Whether the orthopedic surgeon or the orthopedics doctor suggested that or not, it is by far easier to navigate this whole process with somebody in your corner, somebody who can go over and explain to you. The reason that you have pain in the morning is because you’re not moving during the whole night. We naturally collect fluid throughout the evening. 

By not moving, we’re not pumping that fluid out of all the little joints in your feet and your ankle. So that fluid just collects there.

The first couple steps are very, very uncomfortable because you’re trying to push all that fluid out and it doesn’t move as fast as we’d like it to. So a quick trick for that is before you get up in the morning, point and bend your toes, right, wouldn’t that have been helpful to know?

If just by moving your ankles and twisting them around before that first step, it can take a lot of that uncomfortableness away. Then the question becomes how do I get rid of this limp? And why is my foot swelling all the time? Do I still need to be wearing the boot? That is another question that is harder to answer when somebody is not in front of you, just because there can be lots of reasons.

Things are swelling and a certain amount of swelling is normal, but after a certain point, then there is something that you need to be paying attention to. It’s just very hard to give a clear answer for what is acceptable amounts of swelling and what is an acceptable amount of pain without seeing somebody.

These are, again, this is my pitch, right? This is why seeing a specialist – this is what I do as I help people navigate through all of this complexity so that they have more confidence moving. 

Reality is that runners, we are an interesting breed. We will push through pain and that is the only way that anybody ever runs a marathon is by being able to ignore a certain amount of pain. But there’s a caveat to that because if you’ve been injured, sometimes it’s really hard to get back on that horse. 

So as much as you may want to do something, you can be dramatically afraid that you’re going to re-injure yourself. I see runners in these very two dichotomies where they’re either willing to push themselves so far and then some that are very hesitant because they’re very nervous that they’re going to re-injure themselves.

So both of those can be actually detrimental for very different reasons. If you take the runner that is willing to just push past pain, they very much likely could end up hurting themselves. So we will just pretend like it was a bone fracture. Actually it doesn’t even matter if it was a ligament and you’re in a boot and you’re like, I’m just going to push past all this discomfort because I know that it’s just weakness, it’s just range of motion. If I just push, it’ll go through that muscle, that bone, those ligaments have not been used.

Even though you had the strength for six or longer weeks ago, that strength has to be rebuilt up and that range of motion needs to get built back up. Just because you had it before the injury doesn’t mean that that bone is currently strong enough to tolerate that or that ligament is strong enough to withstand the forces of you getting back to running.

There are very clear steps that you can take that will allow you to know that you can safely get back into running. Again, that’s hard to do on your own. It’s very hard to self-diagnose. Then on the other side, if you are afraid to move because everything hurts and you’re just really nervous that you’re going to hurt yourself, the longer you go without moving that ankle and that joint, the harder it is to get the range of motion back. Strength comes back when you start moving. That just means that you’re delaying that process.

Range of motion can really be hard to get back. The longer you don’t have it, it takes a lot more effort, a lot more tenacity to regain range of motion. Just talk to anybody who considers themselves stiff.

They can stretch all day every day and they feel like they get just a little bit of an inch, they take a day off and they feel like they lost it. To a certain extent, there is a lot of truth to that, especially after an injury where they’re still swelling because that swelling can kind of eat away any kind of range of motion.

Knowing and understanding how to move, what to move, what’s acceptable can be very empowering for somebody who’s having a whole lot of anxiety related to moving, which makes a whole lot of sense.

So it’s a very real thing and that is where having somebody in your corner who does this every day, who’s seen it on multiple people in multiple situations that can go through and look at how you are in your ankle, your situation, and know where you are now, where you want to go, and be able to give you guidelines and guardrails on how to get there safely. If that is the type of care that you’re looking for, I’m going to leave a link below. I’m going to leave a couple of them. The first one that I’m going to leave is asking about “cost and availability”.

If you know that this is really what you want and you’re ready, then just fill out that quick little form that says cost and availability. My office will get back to you and we’ll answer those questions and get you scheduled.

If you have a couple questions and you’re not quite sure how working with a specialist would work and you’d prefer to get on a call with me to ask all of those questions I would be happy to get on a call and we can talk about what’s happening specifically with you and how it is that I would be able to help you get back to running after you get out of this walking boot. With that, I will leave a “talk to a PT” link, so it’ll be a little button, you’ll fill out a form and we’ll set up a time to talk based on how you fill out that form. 

I hope that this information is helpful and I hope that you guys are having a great day until I have a chance to talk to you. Bye.

If you are looking for more information.
Check out one of these blogs.

I’m out of the boot, now what? 

Why Does My Ankle Hurt When I Stand Or Walk?

Getting Back To Running After A Bunionectomy