Cycling is incredible for cardiovascular fitness and provides a gentle workout for your joints and muscles, yet many dedicated riders face an unexpected hurdle that can ruin training momentum and demoralize riding enthusiasm. Foot pain in cyclists can strike any rider, from the mild-mannered weekend cyclist to the truest of racers.
Riding repeatedly causes force to be transferred through the heel of the crank, and this force is directed through a relatively small contact area to your cycling shoe and cleat.
You may think of aching toes after the end of a long ride, but the reality is that dorsal and plantar nerves being pinched through your shoe, neuromas or nerve sheaths thicken causing numbness, stabbing pain or just aching long after you get off the bike.
Once you understand why your foot hurts riding, how to treat the pain becomes easy. Prevention will keep your feet happy and pedals spinning smoothly.
Understanding Foot Pain in Cyclists
Any possible foot injury while riding comes down to the forces inside your shoe and toe-box.
Force is driven through an opposed but tiny contact area with shoe and pedal, with somewhere between hundreds and thousands of repetitions.
Many factors, from width of shoe to bike-fit all add up to cause harsh effects on sensitive foot tissue.
Ill Aged Shoe Fit and Cleat Position is Among the Most Common Causes
Tight cycling shoes that are either too narrow or too wide screw up the delicate bit of mechanics on each pedal stroke resulting in cold toes and cramped metatarsals.
An overly wide shoe causes excess pavement inside the shoe leading to increased friction and hot spots.
Performance shoes are stiff and transmission focused, but cause greater forefoot loading mechanically than shoe flexibility aids.
Appropriately locating the cleat-to shoe position helps as well, fore locating the cleat excessively causes excess loading under the ball of the foot.
Moving the cleat farther backward one or two millimeters alleviates this pressure in most cases.
Positioning the cleat depending on hand position when cycling on flat bars, some people tend to hold the thumb out and outside and others tilt their hands inward skewing the center to middle fore foot position.
Nerve/Hot Foot Syndromes
Tendons in the forefoot can get compromised, and persistent hot foot describes a burning sensation experienced during a ride quite intense at the ball of your foot caused by pressure at the ends of nerve sheaths between the toes that can occur when the foot is repeatedly restricted from swelling, to arch, or tremor as when being squeezed in a tight shoe.
Temperature, although we’re calling it hot foot, shares very little in common with real heat other than the sensation of increased shoe or sock temperature when hot spoke is reached.
Truly painful feet feel as if fluid is pooling inside them, although actual swelling may or may not be observable.
Generally the pain develops the longer you ride, and the precise sensation and distribution varies from person to person.
Why Foot Pain in Cyclists Develops
Repeated cycling motion over hard supports in cut-down CTC shoes increase the forces passing to the foot for each revolution.
How to Alleviate Cycling Foot Pain
There is a dozen jumping-off points for attacking cycling pain in foot sensations, but over time several key theme emerge as solutions.
As a toe sensation can be triggered by small increases in bike/cleat fit, a shoe for broad forefoot or footwear of slightly larger toe box sometimes produces miraculous pain relief.
Allow for rest days and vary your intensity of training for each week.
Foot and lower leg strengthening exercises make you stronger and less prone to injury.
Toe curls, calf raises and balance exercises strengthen the small intrinsic muscles of the foot that form your arch and keep your foot stable over the pedal.
Stretching the calves, hamstrings and the plantar fascia will keep your muscles supple and able to perform biomechanically.
Rolling your foot over a tennis ball or frozen water bottle after rides helps flush out the toxins that build up after exercise.
Substitute some cycling with swimming or yoga.