Hi, I’m Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. Do you play tennis? Are you over 40? And are you looking to make sure that you protect your Achilles tendon? This video is perfect for you.
You know that it takes so long to recover from even a “minor” Achilles injury. It just sort of keeps creeping back up. For many people, they feel like once the Achilles was injured, it kind of takes the love of the sport out because you just keep reaggravating that tendon. It just keeps coming back. Why won’t it go away? If that is where you are, stick with me here. We’re going to go over a few things.
Anyone who has played tennis for any length of time has, at the very least, a friend who has had an Achilles tendon injury, if not their own Achilles injury.
Now, there is a lot of marketing out there for all sorts of different types of shoes, good shoes in the sense that I’m saying it, they should fit well. They should have a good grip so that you’re not sliding all over the court.
As far as whether I should buy this type of shoe or this type of shoe, it should fit you. It should help address whatever type of foot that you have. If you have a flat foot there should be some form of corrective arch in there. If you overpronate, it should have some form of stability for that.
Many people buy a shoe based on marketing, which I mean that makes sense. But in truth, if you always wear hard-soled shoes because of the type of work environment that you have for many people, you have to wear some form of dress shoe to work, which has a hard soul. Then you go and put these sneakers on that let your foot do whatever it wants, like the freeze, you know, Nike free.
I don’t wanna pick on Nike, but shoes that don’t have any support like barefoot running or barefoot shoes, that is just too much freedom for your foot. You are asking it to go from having to do no work while you do your eight hour day to doing all the work while you’re doing your sport. Sometimes just the shoe fit can cause a problem.
You need to make sure that whatever shoe it is, that it fits you properly. It’s not too small, it’s not too big, too small would be that your toes are bumping into the front because you have a lot of stopping when you’re playing tennis. If your shoe just barely fits you, like you don’t have any room in the front of your shoe or if you have too much and you’re just sliding all over the place, I actually do have a video on proper shoe size. If you would like to take a look at that, we’ll leave a link below.
You wanna make sure that the shoe fits you and it corrects for whatever it is that you need. There’s a very small amount of the population that has absolutely a normal neutral foot at all times. You just need to make sure that you know what kind of support you need.
Nobody likes to stretch. In fact, even as you say that, I would almost prefer to watch paint dry as to sit in one position for a minute, waiting for the muscle to relax and to stretch into it. Thankfully, passive stretches or that like just stay there and hold is not the only type of stretch that there is.
There are lots of different types of ways that you can stretch, active stretching and just many different ways, right? The good news is they normally have classes for this. If you are more of a person who would be willing to stretch, especially like a full body stretch in a class there are yoga classes. If that’s not your thing, now you can find more classes and more support for that.
You don’t have to just abort the mission because the idea of doing a yoga class sounds horrible and stretching is super boring. I’m just going to pretend like I did it and not really do it. I would find some way to stretch whether, however you can find that for yourself that stretches your whole body because as you know, tennis is a full body sport.
You can have tightness in one part of your body that you don’t even necessarily realize that could be affecting not only your Achilles tendon, but your performance playing your sport.
Stretching the normal stretches that people think about when you talk about stretching for your Achilles, is the stretch where you keep your foot flat on the floor and your knee straight. I’ll put pictures up, but your foot’s straight and you’ll have your knee is straight and that’s your gas rock.
Then the one where your knee bends, that’s your soleus. Another one that people like to do is where you hang off. You’re on like a step or I would say a ledge, but it’s probably more like a curb and you let your heel drop below where your toes are. I would actually suggest never doing that again because when you do that particular stretch, you are actually stretching everything in your foot as much of, if not, instead of your Achilles.
Depending on how flexible your foot is, you could be getting all of that range of motion just from stretching out where all the bones are in your feet. I have worked with many, many people who have Achilles tendonitis and Achilles tears. Their go-to stretch was just doing that. They didn’t have any other stretches in their wheelhouse and that one stretch was not doing what they thought it was doing because they had such a flexible foot.
Their foot just took all the stretch and their Achilles didn’t actually get as much of a stretch as they were assuming. Again, I’ll have photos up of the two stretches that are specifically for your ankle and just avoid the one where you just drop your heels down.
Now, depending on what you’re doing with your tennis, because some people are like every day at the club and they’re playing five days a week, six days a week.
That might be too much and that might be too much for anybody. Very few people, including pros, play any sport every day of the week. If that’s you, I would have you bring that down a notch and try to add in a few different types of strengthening or other days of working out that are not going to play tennis.
To give your body a break and to do cross-training. A strengthening program, and again, since tennis is a full body sport, I suggest upper body strengthening, lower body strengthening, they are key.
Now as to the specific exercises, those can vary. You just create yourself a program that is balanced and stick with it long enough to make sure that you can help counterbalance what you do during tennis. In tennis you use very specific muscles.
If you keep using those six days a week, you will overtrain them. You can use your strengthening day to help combat that and to reinforce good habits on the muscles that you’re using during tennis. An overall strengthening program is key.
Plyometrics is the fancy word for you’re going to jump practice, jumping and landing. Anything can really become plyometric. I mean you can do plyometric lunges, squats. You can do the running in place where your butt kicks.
All those things would be considered plyometrics because it’s explosive and you’re landing. It does not have to be something where you’re standing on a box and you jump down and jump back up. That is a plyometric, but that does not have to be the plyometric that you’re doing. The whole point specifically in terms of your Achilles is to make sure that you’re good at absorbing the impact and anything that you practice, you’ll be better at during your sport.
If you take part of the strength day or maybe make your own day where you practice jumping and landing in different ways. You can jump to the side, you can jump forward, you can jump straight up, but practicing jumping and landing to make sure that you know what happens at your ankle, knee and hip when you’re landing.
That is going to be key to keeping everything in your lower body healthy while you play tennis. Biometrics are very, very important. What you’re trying to do is practice how you’re landing. You don’t want to land loudly.
The whole point behind training for the plyometrics is to make sure that you can land quietly and consistently. You don’t want your ankle rolling one way. You don’t want your knee going any which way it wants to go. You want to land quietly and you want to land securely and stably.
On your days for plyometrics, that’s what you’re training. Now balance would be another great idea. I know nobody thinks about it, but when you’re doing your side to side movements, you’re asking your body to land all the way on one foot at least momentarily to be stable enough to help propel you into any direction that you need to quickly go after that ball, right?
If you do not have as stable an ankle as you think you do, then that can cause some uneven wearing of your Achilles, your knee or your hip. Again, on one of the days that you’re going to not play tennis, my suggestion is to train balance. You should train it on one leg, see what you can do standing on one leg, try uneven surfaces.
You can do different activities on uneven surfaces. The idea is to challenge your ankle strength and stability while you’re in a controlled environment, because if you can’t stand on one foot for 30 seconds, imagine what that’s doing to your Achilles while you play a game. It’s a whole lot of stress and strain on that Achilles. Balance training, very, very important.
That can be very overwhelming, which is why my suggestion for the fastest way to make sure you can come up with a program that helps you prevent injuring your Achilles and keeping it safe, is to speak with a movement specialist who can help you see how you walk.
Maybe you don’t know if you have some form of a deficit in your foot. You wouldn’t even know what type of shoe to go get. They can help you look at your overall strength. Anything, well since tennis really is a whole body sport, making sure that everything in your body is strong and stable while you’re doing your sport and they can actually watch you in real time while you do certain movements.
All of that information can be taken and created a very specialized program for you. It doesn’t mean that you have to see this specialist for months, over months.
The idea is to go ahead and give yourself a good screening tool to make sure that you have the tools to keep yourself healthy in the long run. Once you learn what you’re supposed to do, you should be able to continue on your own.
If this is the type of care that you’re looking for I’m going to leave a button below that says ask about cost and availability. You’ll fill out a quick little form and my office will get back to you to set up the appointment that you’re requesting.
Then if you have specific questions about your specific needs and you’d prefer to have a conversation first with me just to find out exactly how this would work or if you’re specific instance, these things could be helpful, then I will leave a button below that says, ask to talk to a pt.
You’ll fill out a quick form because what we do is we set up a 20 minute time we’ll agree on. It’s kind of like an appointment time at no cost. But that way we know that we have the time available to answer all of your questions and not feel rushed. The idea is to make sure that you walk away with all the information you need to make the next steps that are right for you. So I hope that you are having a great day, and that you’re enjoying your tennis.
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