The term ‘weekend warrior’ has been used to define people who only do sporting activity in their spare time. In my experience, this tends to happen when people hit their thirties. It certainly did for me and my close friendship group, when increasing hectic lifestyles, work commitments and parenting shifted sporting activities to a lower echelon of importance. This results in catching any kind of physical activity in whatever spare moment you can muster. With my physician hat on, I can assure you this is not great for the body. The ‘weekend warrior’ tends to be stiff, over-weight, lacking muscle memory and with worse general fitness. Couple this with thoughts of grandeur to their ‘glory days’, and it is a recipe for disaster. It should be no surprise then, that the rate of injury in this group is considerably higher than in those who take regular exercise. Achilles’ tendon ruptures are particularly common in the ‘weekend warrior’.

In regards to heel pain, I see in my practice a recurring theme every year. I always get a significant increase in referrals in March-April, after failed conservative treatment of heel pain that started in January-February. The characteristics of the people this refers to is very predictable. They tend to be male ‘weekend warriors’, who had a period of inactivity over the winter, who over indulged at Christmas and decided to go on a ‘get fit’ drive for their new years resolution. On their ‘get fit’ drive, they start doing early morning runs. If they are belly/side sleepers, where their feet are in a ‘pointing down’ (equinus) position all

night, we have a ‘perfect storm’ situation.

 

Breaking this down logically, this situation causes an over-weight individual, lacking pliability in their muscles, to go for a run when the calf muscles are at their greatest level of stiffness due to their problematic foot position at night. Bearing in mind that 4-8x your body weight goes through your heel (plantar fascia and Achilles) when you run, there is no wonder why the heel starts hurting. I see in equal measure Plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendinopathy turning up to my clinic as the result.