What Exercises Can You Do With Plantar Fasciitis?

Stretching, strengthening, and targeted foot exercises are among the most effective treatments for plantar fasciitis, and in many cases they outperform passive approaches like ice or rest alone. The research points toward a combination of plantar fascia-specific stretches and progressive heavy-load strength training as the strongest starting point, with exercises for the small muscles inside the foot and even the hip playing supporting roles. The catch is that not all exercises help equally, and some common cardio activities need modification to avoid making the heel worse.

Stretching That Actually Targets the Plantar Fascia

Two types of stretching come up in plantar fasciitis treatment: calf stretches and plantar fascia-specific stretches. They are not interchangeable. A systematic review and meta-analysis found moderate-quality evidence that stretching the plantar fascia directly produces a larger reduction in pain than calf stretching alone.¹ That doesn’t mean calf stretches are useless, but it does mean they probably shouldn’t be your only stretch.

A plantar fascia-specific stretch looks like this: you sit down, cross the affected foot over the opposite knee, and use your hand to pull the toes back toward the shin until you feel a stretch along the bottom of the foot. Hold for about 10 seconds, repeat 10 times, and do it before your first steps in the morning and at least twice more during the day. This stretch works along the tissue itself, creating tension that helps remodel it over time.

Calf stretching, on the other hand, targets the Achilles tendon and the muscles behind the lower leg. Because the Achilles connects to the heel bone right where the plantar fascia attaches, a tight calf pulls upward on the same structure. A randomized trial found that two weeks of calf stretching improved first-step pain and foot function, but the improvement wasn’t significantly better than a control group that received no stretching instructions.² That result is a bit sobering, and it suggests that calf stretching alone is a weak standalone treatment. Combining both types of stretch, or pairing calf stretches with strengthening, is a better bet.

A home-based stretching program studied in patients with plantar fasciitis found significant improvements in pain scores and in the strength of several muscle groups around the ankle and toes, including the muscles that flex the big toe and the smaller toes.³ The takeaway is that consistent, daily stretching at home does produce measurable changes, even without a clinic visit. You just need to stick with it.

High-Load Strength Training With a Towel Under the Toes

This is the exercise that gets the most attention in recent plantar fasciitis research, and for good reason. In a randomized controlled trial, patients who performed heavy-load heel raises every other day had significantly better outcomes at three months than patients who only stretched. The strength-training group scored about 29 points lower on a foot-function disability index, a gap large enough to be clinically meaningful.⁴

The exercise itself is straightforward. You stand on a step or a thick book with only the ball of your foot on the edge, and you place a rolled-up towel under your toes so they’re held in an extended position. Then you perform a slow heel raise: three seconds up, two-second hold at the top, three seconds down. The towel forces the plantar fascia into a loaded stretch during the movement, which stimulates tissue adaptation in the fascia itself. You start with both feet and your bodyweight only, then progress to single-leg raises and eventually add weight using a backpack or by holding a dumbbell. Doing this every other day rather than daily gives the tissue time to recover between sessions.

A word of realism, though: a follow-up trial testing similar heavy-slow resistance training found that most participants still had not reached an “acceptable symptom state” after 12 weeks.⁵ The exercise helps, and it helps faster than stretching alone, but plantar fasciitis is stubborn. For many people, strength training is one piece of a longer recovery, not a quick fix. That same trial also found that letting people choose their own dose versus following a prescribed schedule produced similar results, so if you adjust the weight or reps based on how your heel feels that day, you’re unlikely to do worse than someone following a rigid plan.

Building the Small Muscles Inside Your Foot

Your foot has its own layer of small muscles that support the arch from underneath, and strengthening them has become a growing focus in plantar fasciitis rehab. A systematic review and meta-analysis of 13 studies found that intrinsic foot muscle exercises improved arch height, balance, foot strength, and patient-reported disability scores compared to control groups.⁶ The improvements in arch support are especially relevant, because a collapsing arch increases strain on the plantar fascia with every step.

The most commonly studied exercise in this category is the “short foot” exercise, sometimes called foot doming. You sit or stand and try to shorten your foot by drawing the ball of the foot toward the heel without curling the toes. It looks subtle from the outside, but the muscles under the arch are working hard. A pilot trial in people with flat feet found that this exercise corrected static foot alignment and improved the timing of how the arch moves during walking, which suggests a better functioning “windlass mechanism,” the spring-like action that supports the arch during push-off.⁷

Other exercises in this family include toe curls with a towel (scrunching a towel toward you using only your toes), toe spreading (actively fanning the toes apart), and picking up marbles or small objects with your feet. A study combining therapeutic foot exercises with minimalist footwear found significant increases in great-toe and lesser-toe strength measured with a dynamometer after the intervention.⁸ These gains matter because stronger toe flexors help distribute load across the foot and reduce the concentration of force right at the heel.

A practical foot-core routine might look like this: short foot holds (3 sets of 10, holding each for 5 to 10 seconds), towel curls (3 sets of 15), and toe spreading (3 sets of 10). You can do these while sitting at a desk, watching TV, or standing in your kitchen. They don’t require equipment beyond a towel and a flat surface.

Why Your Hips Are Part of a Heel Problem

It might seem odd to work on your glutes when your heel hurts, but the connection is well documented. Weakness in the hip abductor muscles, the muscles on the outside of the hip that keep your pelvis level when you walk, can increase the load on the plantar fascia by altering how pressure distributes across the foot during gait. A case report published in Medicine detailed a patient with persistent plantar fasciitis whose heel pain improved after a hip-strengthening program, not a foot-focused one. The authors noted that hip abductor weakness during walking can lead to overuse of the calf and foot muscles, increasing the strain on the plantar fascia. The same patient had a Trendelenburg sign, a visible pelvis drop on the opposite side during single-leg stance, which concentrates pressure toward the forefoot and heel.⁹

This doesn’t mean everyone with plantar fasciitis has weak hips. But if your heel pain has been lingering despite stretching and foot exercises, it’s worth testing. Can you stand on one leg for 30 seconds without your opposite hip dropping? Can you do a single-leg squat without your knee caving inward? If either is difficult, adding side-lying hip abductions, clamshells, or banded lateral walks to your routine addresses a potential upstream contributor. These exercises don’t load the foot at all, which makes them a good option during flare-ups when heel-loading exercises are too painful.

Cardio and Aerobic Exercise During Recovery

Plantar fasciitis doesn’t mean you have to stop exercising altogether, but you do need to think about which activities repeatedly slam force into your heel. Running, jumping, and long walks on hard surfaces all involve cyclical loading of the plantar fascia, and a clinical management review recommends reducing that kind of repetitive impact during the treatment phase regardless of what other treatments you’re using.¹⁰

The goal isn’t to become sedentary. It’s to swap high-impact activities for lower-impact ones while the fascia heals. Swimming and deep-water running remove ground-reaction force entirely. Cycling, whether stationary or on the road, keeps your foot in a relatively neutral position and avoids the repetitive heel strike of running. Elliptical machines can work if you keep the resistance moderate and avoid pushing through the ball of the foot too aggressively. Rowing is another option that loads the legs without impact. These alternatives let you maintain cardiovascular fitness and overall health while reducing the mechanical stress that caused the problem.

If you’re a runner who isn’t willing to stop entirely, reducing mileage and intensity while increasing the proportion of training on softer surfaces is a reasonable compromise. Some runners also benefit from temporarily shortening their stride, which shifts impact away from the heel. The evidence here is more practical than experimental, but the principle is sound: every step is a load cycle on the fascia, and fewer or gentler cycles mean less irritation.

What Your Shoes Are Doing to Your Feet

Footwear interacts with every exercise and every step you take, so it deserves attention. A study on routine footwear and plantar fasciitis found that both very flat shoes (heels under about half a centimeter) and high heels (over four centimeters) were associated with worse foot outcomes. Raising the heel height to a moderate level reduced pressure on the heel and plantar fascia.¹¹ The same study found that very few participants used shoes with cushioned insoles or arch support, despite evidence that these features help. Only about 7% wore shoes supporting the foot arch, and just 4% used orthotic insoles or heel pads.

For exercise specifically, this means wearing a supportive athletic shoe with a moderate heel-to-toe drop and a cushioned midsole. Completely flat minimalist shoes can increase fascial loading, which is fine as a training stimulus if you’re doing a deliberate strengthening program, but counterproductive if you’re trying to reduce pain during daily walks or gym sessions. If you use a custom or over-the-counter orthotic, wearing it during exercise provides additional arch support and can reduce first-step pain. One study found preliminary evidence that using a temporary custom foot orthotic for two weeks followed by a stretching program improved first-step heel pain and foot function for up to 12 weeks.¹²

Body Weight and the Load Equation

Plantar fasciitis is, at its core, a problem of too much load on tissue that can’t handle it. Body weight is one of the biggest contributors to that load. A systematic review and meta-analysis of risk factors found that a BMI above 27 was associated with roughly 3.7 times the odds of developing plantar fasciitis, and the effect was strongest in people who were not athletes.¹³ That doesn’t mean every person with plantar fasciitis is overweight, but it means that for people who are carrying extra weight, even modest weight loss reduces the mechanical demand on the fascia with every step.

This creates a frustrating loop: heel pain makes it harder to stay active, reduced activity can lead to weight gain, and weight gain worsens heel pain. Breaking the cycle often means choosing forms of exercise that burn calories without aggravating the foot. The low-impact cardio options mentioned earlier, like swimming, cycling, and rowing, become doubly important for people in this situation. Strength training for the upper body and core also keeps overall fitness up without loading the plantar fascia.

When Fear of Pain Gets in the Way

One of the less discussed obstacles to exercising with plantar fasciitis is psychological. A study measuring pain catastrophizing and kinesiophobia (fear of movement) in people with plantar heel pain found that both were significantly associated with worse foot function, even after controlling for age, sex, and BMI. Catastrophizing, the tendency to ruminate about pain, magnify it, and feel helpless about it, was also associated with worse first-step pain.¹⁴

This matters for exercise because if you expect every step to hurt, you’re more likely to avoid the very activities that promote healing. The towel heel raise, for example, is supposed to be somewhat uncomfortable. The load is the point. People who interpret that discomfort as damage may stop the exercise prematurely, missing out on the tissue-remodeling benefits. Clinicians who treat plantar fasciitis increasingly recognize that addressing fear of movement is part of the treatment, not a distraction from it. Understanding that some discomfort during loaded exercise is normal and expected, distinct from sharp pain that signals you should stop, can help people stay consistent with their programs.

A reasonable rule of thumb: pain during an exercise that stays at a manageable level (often described as 3 to 4 out of 10) and settles back to baseline within 24 hours is generally acceptable. Pain that spikes sharply during the exercise, gets worse the next morning, or leaves you limping suggests you’ve overloaded the tissue and need to reduce the intensity or volume.

Putting a Program Together

The research points toward a layered approach rather than picking one exercise and hoping for the best. A Delphi consensus study brought together experts to design a progressive strengthening program for plantar heel pain and arrived at a set of 10 different exercises with consensus on sets, repetitions, weight, and frequency across different clinical presentations.¹⁵ The details varied by severity, but the principle was consistent: start with what you can tolerate, increase the load progressively, and include exercises for both the foot itself and the surrounding chain.

A practical weekly template for someone in the early-to-middle stages of plantar fasciitis might look like this:

Daily: Plantar fascia-specific stretches before your first steps in the morning and two to three more times during the day.
Every other day: Towel heel raises, starting with both feet and progressing to single-leg as tolerated, 3 sets of 12 repetitions with slow tempo.
Three to five days per week: Foot intrinsic exercises (short foot, toe curls, toe spreading), 2 to 3 sets of 10 to 15 repetitions each.
Two to three days per week: Hip abduction and gluteal strengthening if weakness is present.
As desired: Low-impact cardio (cycling, swimming, elliptical) in place of running or prolonged walking on hard surfaces.

Exercise therapy has also been found to improve functional activity more than passive treatments like ice massage in plantar fasciitis patients, reinforcing that movement-based approaches deserve the central role in treatment.¹⁶ Ice can still feel good after a long day, but it’s not a substitute for the mechanical stimulus that drives tissue healing. Prioritize the exercises, and use ice as an adjunct for symptom relief when you need it.

Exercises That Can Make Plantar Fasciitis Worse

Not every exercise belongs in a plantar fasciitis program. Plyometrics, box jumps, jump rope, and any explosive push-off movement send large, rapid forces through the plantar fascia and are best avoided until symptoms have substantially resolved. Barefoot running or walking on hard floors, especially first thing in the morning when the fascia is at its stiffest, is a common aggravator. Heavy barbell calf raises without the towel-under-toes modification load the Achilles but bypass the fascia-specific stimulus, and the high loads involved can worsen heel pain if the fascia isn’t ready.

Prolonged standing in one spot, though not technically exercise, deserves mention because many people assume it’s neutral. It isn’t. Standing loads the fascia statically for extended periods without the active muscle engagement that occurs during walking. If your job requires long hours on your feet, anti-fatigue mats, supportive footwear, and periodic calf raises or foot doming exercises throughout the day can offset some of that sustained strain.

Yoga and Pilates can be safe and beneficial, but certain poses need modification. Deep calf stretches in downward dog are generally fine and may help. Poses that hyperextend the toes, like kneeling with toes tucked under, can aggravate an irritable plantar fascia. Balancing poses on one foot can actually serve double duty as proprioceptive training for the foot, as long as they don’t provoke sharp heel pain. The key across all activities is the same: some discomfort is acceptable, sharp or worsening pain is your signal to modify or stop.