When can I walk at home barefoot with a second metatarsal stress fracture? That is a great question and that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I was talking with an injured runner who had a stress fracture in the second metatarsal bone, and he was doing a whole bunch of stuff to get it to heal faster. He had gone through all this stuff in the stress fracture course for runners and he was doing great, and he asked me a question, when can I walk at home with this second metatarsal stress fracture?
Well, here is a true or false, walking barefoot at home increases the stress to the injured bone. Would you agree with that? What about wearing athletic shoes? Would that decrease the stress to the injured bone as compared to walking barefoot? Would you agree with that? And if you can reduce the total stress applied to that one injured bone, do you think you could run farther before you stress that bone to the point of re-injury? I mean, doesn’t that make sense?
The way I think about this is really simple and this is how I explained it to this runner. I said, look, you really cannot return to running until the bone is strong enough to withstand the total stresses applied to running. But the bone that is injured, this recovering has to absorb the total forces applied to the bone throughout the day as well when you’re not running. And so, if you want to walk around barefoot at home and you don’t really know if you’re at the point that you can run safely yet, the way I think about it is you’re using up stress points because I think you only have so many stress points applied to that bone before it cracks again.
At each stage of the recovery, the whole goal is to increase your fitness as rapidly as possible without exceeding the stress applied to that second metatarsal bone where it’s been injured. So, if you’re walking around barefoot at home, you’re getting closer and closer to that line with less and less running. That is the way I think about it.
I basically had said my answer to him really simply was that it’s okay for you to walk around barefoot at home when you have a second metatarsal stress fracture, when you can be sure that it is safe for you to actually run, and you are safely running. That is when you can start walking around barefoot. But as a runner, your whole goal is to get back to running. So, walking around barefoot doesn’t really advance that goal at all. It just uses up stress points unnecessarily in my mind.
If you want to learn more about the strategies I use with runners that have things like second metatarsal stress fractures, and they’re trying to get back to running, I explain all of that to you in detail, the step-by-step strategies I use in the Stress Fracture Masterclass. It’s free and you can get it at www.docontherun.com/stressfracturemasterclass. So come check it out. See you in the training and I’ll see you there.
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