Maybe you've had tight feelings in your calves. Maybe you've had sore feet. One thing that can cause both of these is inflammation of your Achilles' tendon. This post is going to show you a few things you can do at home to help calm down your Achilles and start returning to your active lifestyle.
What Is The Achilles' Tendon
The Achilles tendon is the thickest tendon in your body. It connects the two muscles of your calf (gastrocnemius and soleus) to your ankle bone (calcaneus). It is that thick band you feel in the bottom third of the back of your lower leg.
Your Achilles helps you push off of the ground for things like running and jumping. When you do this too much for what your body is ready for, you may experience some symptoms in the area.
These symptoms may include:
Tightness
Pain
Decreased motion
Tenderness to touch
What To Do When You have These Symptoms
When you experience symptoms in your Achilles there are a few things you can do to help it heal and get better faster.
The general things that you can do when you have any injury but will help with tendon injuries are:
Eat - increase your protein intake. Your body will use protein to help heal tissues like tendons
Drink - your body is mostly water. By making sure you are getting enough water (shoot towards 100 oz. per day) you will help your body stay hydrated and take advantage of natural healing processes.
Sleep - this is when your body can heal itself. Work on getting at least 7 hours of sleep per night in order to help speed recovery from injury. If you already get a lot of sleep, try to add 30 more minutes at night.
For the Achilles tendon specifically (and I hate saying this), back off of high impact exercises like running and/or jumping (this includes Olympic Lifting). The nature of the explosive movements can further damage your Achilles'.
For all tendon issues you want to work on isometric and eccentric training.
Isometric: Isometric is when your joints don't move, but the muscle is firing. For your Achilles, try sitting with your feet flat on the ground and pushing your toes through the floor without lifting your heels!
Eccentric: This is the lengthening portion of a contraction-
This is just a start to your recovery. After your symptoms decrease you can slowly start to build back to your normal exercise routine. Be careful not to just start where you left off.
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