How Much Do You Know About Tight Calves?

Tight calves hurt! Foot and calf pain - the worst. Who’s with me? I don’t know about you, but I’m frustrated. We have running to do. Wearing high heels can be painful on the legs (so I hear). Fighting is hard enough, why battle unnecessary tightness? What about working in an environment where we need to stand all day? Ouch!

Your solution is in the quick video below. RAD Director of Education, Kevin Hendry, demonstrates just how easy it is to take care of tight calves and increase ankle mobility. No joke, doing the exercises in this video will keep your calves happy for years. This stuff works!

Let’s break down the steps from the video:

• Assess where the real issue is with a quick mobility assessment.
• Attend to the problem with one or more of the proven techniques demonstrated.
• Get those tissues to glide over one another, enhancing mobility, blood flow, tissue recovery, etc.
• Reassess mobility to be sure that technique(s) worked for you.
• Lastly, take advantage of this window of opportunity by getting out there and using those tissues in a variety of movement patterns. This is as simple as taking a walk, perform light exercises that require balance, etc. The idea is to integrate the nervous system here to “train the brain.”

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? I already have enough to do during the day than attend to a tight calf. I mean, it’s not a big deal, right? When it hurts I can get a massage or dig in with a tennis ball and hope the pain or tightness doesn’t come back?

Here’s the thing - change causes change. If you've had tight calves for a while and you keep doing the same thing to solve the problem, why would anything change? Furthermore, restriction in our calves can wreak havoc on our feet, ankles, hips, lower back, and even shoulders and neck! Crazy, right? So what to do? Change the process, so we arrive at a different outcome. A successful one!