Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast, we’re talking about how you can alter your running shoe lacing pattern if you have this condition called tenosynovitis.
Now, if you get tenosynovitis, it can often be really irritating and it’s not a really complicated condition, but it can cause a lot of pain. Here’s how it works. What happens is you have some extensor tendons that actually go out to the toes, and those are on the top of your foot, and they’re the tendons that actually pull your toes up when you swing through in the swing phase of gait, and they actually pull your toes upward.
The reason they get irritated and the reason you get pain is that you actually have a tendon sheath around these things, and that tendon sheath actually decreases friction where they go through all of the tissue, under the bands of tissue that you have over the foot so they can glide and slide as you’re walking.
Well, if you start running and your shoelaces actually push on there and they irritate it and they aggravate it, you get inflammation within the tendon sheath and then you get a big painful spot right on the top of your foot. So, there’s a simple way you can address this. Treating tenosynovitis is really complicated. Oh, by the way, teno is for tendon, synovitis is inflammation of the sheath, and it’s really referring to the tendon sheath itself instead of tendonitis, where you have inflammation of the tendon. Tenosynovitis means you have inflammation of the tissue on the inside of the tube around there.
Here’s how it works. When you’re looking at your running shoes, if you’re looking down at the laces, this is your shoe and you have the laces. Okay, so you’ve got the holes and the laces and the shoes’ laces, of course, are crossing like this all the way up to your ankle. Now what you do is, let’s say that you have this painful spot right here on the top of your foot.
So what your goal is, is to figure out where the painful spot is. What you do is you put your running shoes on, you lace them up, you tie them up, and then you poke around on the top of your foot and you’re going to find one spot where it’s most tender. And let’s say that spot is right here. Then the way you’re going to alter the laces to take the painful irritation away from there is you’re going to actually alter the laces so that you skip that spot, again, if you’re looking at your laces.
Now, you’re trying to get all the pressure off of there. So this is how you do it. So let’s say the pressure’s right here. You put your finger on there, that’s the painful spot. So you take the laces that are going from here to here, and you want to skip that hole. That’s the trick. Basically, you unlace your laces all the way to here, pull them out of the holes, and then relace them. So you skip this hole.
So you basically, instead of going across, you come up, and then once you come up, you actually go across like that. And by doing that, then when you tie it here, you actually have skipped that spot. So you wind up with laces going across normally on the parts of the tendon sheath that are not irritated, and then you skip right over to decrease the irritation where you do have that painful spot.
That’s how you do it. So you’re skipping that hole. So that’s all you do is you unlace them from the top, go down to where the painful spot is, and then skip it so that then when you push on there afterward, if you push on this spot now between the laces instead of where the laces crossed, you’ll actually have decreased pain and decreased irritation there. And that’s one of the simplest ways to decrease the pressure and friction that’s actually aggravating the tendon sheath on the top of your foot. Try it out. Check it out. If you like this video, please share it, please subscribe, and I’ll see you in the next training.
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