Changing the Feet to Change the Pain with Jordan Betsworth
About Jordan
The Kings University in Edmonton, Canada
Setter
AWA and Jordan’s History
This past summer I got to work with Jordan throughout her off-season. Her main goal was to come into this season more resilient than ever without any of the left achilles pain that she has experienced in past seasons.
Jordan is a setter that plays at The Kings University in Edmonton, Canada. She’s incredibly strong and mobile. She is such a fun athlete to work with because of her constant curiosity in why we are doing things but also her trust in the process. During our assessment at the beginning of the off-season we found a couple of things that we figured could be linked to the achilles pain she was experiencing.
We saw right away that Jordan had relatively “flat feet”. Now I don’t really care about the shape of the feet as much as I care about how they function as they’re challenged. So we just started to pay attention to what her feet were doing as she performed different movements.
One of the most clear ways her lack of arch strength showed up was while she jumped. You can see in the video below as she jumps and especially as she lands her left arch collapses and brings her achilles and knee inwards with it. We figured this inward motion of the achilles that happens every time she jumps could be a cause of some of the pain she was experiencing.
We also challenged the endurance of her foot/calf complex through a single leg calf raise endurance test where he left side showed up with significantly less endurance.
So these two things paired up with some other assessments allowed us to start experimenting to see what would work best. Our initial experiment was designed to see if we could strengthen her arches, if her jumping pattern would clean up.
How do we strengthen arches?
When people have flat feet the most common traditional remedy is to wear orthotics. I do believe there is a time and place for orthotics but in my opinion they’re essentially a cast, protecting the foot from immediate harm but not changing anything for long-term health.
If you’ve ever worn a cast you’ll know that the muscle under the cast is smaller and weaker when you take the cast off. The same thing can happen with orthotics, the more you wear them the less the foot has to create an arch as the orthotics are creating one for it. So we get arches that don’t hold shape as we challenge them with athletic movements.
So to strengthen Jordan’s arches we took a two pronged approach. We trained her with her heel off the ground in the gym and we got her into some minimalist shoes periodically away from the gym.
In the gym:
First we started to load her feet with her heels off the ground. Our arches evolved when we evolved from aquatic to quadrupedal beings. When we evolved and came onto solid ground we started as quadrupeds (walking on all fours) with our heels were off the ground. This heel elevated position allowed us to develop arches as a result. So we took Jordan’s heels off the ground and gave her a ton of endurance in this position.
Then we added more strength to the arches by continuing to elevate her heels as we challenged her with more strength specific patterns.
And finally we added some more speed to allow her feet to be ready for the jumping and running she will have to do as a setter in volleyball.
Now we also trained her with her heels on the ground, but when we did this we always had an intention on maintaining the shape of her arch as she lifted. This meant she did a lot of awareness based exercises early on in the off-season and progressed to more endurance, strength and power exercises as she got the feeling for it.
Away from the gym:
We are always on our feet, so we have lots of chances to change how the feet function outside of the gym as well. One of the things that can prevent our feet from being strong and functional is the footwear we choose to wear. Most shoes have a narrow toe box that squish our toes together and have a heel that takes away the necessity of foot/ankle structure to work.
So Jordan got some toe spacers to wear around her house to spread out her toes and some minimalist shoes that had a wide toe box and no heel to them. Her goal was to build up her capacity to wear the shoes for longer periods throughout the day as the summer progressed.
In the end Jordan was no longer experiencing her achilles pain and we noticed some cool improvements in her jump as she was able to maintain her arch through her take off and landing better than before.
Before
After
What’s next?
By the end of summer we saw some cool changes happen for Jordan. She is now in her first season of full-time starting on her college team. She is doing her teams S&C program with a couple of additional exercises from me focused around continuing to strengthen her arches as our original experiment seems to be working. There is still work to do to continue to improve things but I am super excited with how much she improved over the summer.
Interested in how we work with athletes to improve velocity, jump higher and play pain free?
