By all accounts, 1997 was to be the year Bob Kennedy’s face found its way onto a Wheaties box. The year before, at 26, he’d broken an 11-year-old U.S. record in the 5,000 meters, becoming the first person not from Africa to run the event in under 13 minutes. In an all-out effort to close in on the event’s top dog, Kenyan Daniel Komen, he upped his mileage and shed some weight by switching to lighter shoes. Then came the pain. At first it felt like little more than a bruise — understandable, given that his feet pounded 100 miles of pavement each week. After several months more of training, he could hardly walk at all.

Kennedy had strained his left plantar fascia, a band of tissue that runs along the bottom of the foot, and would be sidelined until it healed. “I think athletes can be really stupid about their own bodies,” says Kennedy, somewhat sheepishly. “If a friend had come to me and said, ‘I’m having a little heel pain,’ I would have told him to get it checked out. But it was me — I guess I thought I could run through it.” Ten months would pass before he could run without pain, and it wasn’t until last fall that he was back up to full speed.

Perhaps it’s surprising that such an inglorious ailment sneaked up on a professional athlete like Kennedy. But it doesn’t bode well for the rest of us, who pay even less attention to our crucial yet oh-so-vulnerable feet. Indeed, they are the athlete’s most commonly injured anatomical feature, with roughly 3,000 things that can, and often do, go wrong. And that’s not counting ramifications for the legs, hips, and back. The most prevalent problem is injuries of overuse, which can manifest themselves in a host of debilitating ways, such as shinsplints, stress fractures, Achilles tendinitis, and yes, plantar fasciitis.

The good news, however, is that such injuries unfold gradually, so if you nip them in the bud, you can easily get back on track. “Most people pooh-pooh foot pain,” says William Olson, a podiatrist who treats players for the San Francisco Giants. “I’m always surprised when someone shows up in my office and they’ve only had pain for two weeks. But the length of time you’ve been in pain is directly proportional to the amount of time it’s going to take to heal.”

The Underlying Problem

Despite their propensity to undermine our most lofty athletic ambitions, the lowly feet are an engineering marvel. Possessing 56 bones, 66 joints, 214 ligaments, 38 muscles, and six arches, our two humble locomotors do a considerable amount of work as part of their daily routine. The average person takes nearly 10,000 steps a day — enough to chalk up four laps around the globe over the course of an average lifetime. And when running, the force of each step can equal four times your body weight. Yet cruel as the joke may seem, the same intricate architecture that makes our pedestals so sturdy leaves them unduly prone to injury.

For Kennedy, trouble started innocently enough, with an overly cushiony pair of new running shoes that changed the angle of his footfalls ever so slightly. His case gets at the core of all overuse injuries of the foot: biomechanics. A normal foot will strike on the outside of the heel; roll in, or pronate, about five degrees; and then roll back out slightly for the toe-off. If your foot is aligned as it should be during the toe-off, the bones and ligaments tighten as if they were conducting an electric current and provide an unfalteringly firm platform. But any misalignment at this moment shifts the burden of support to the muscles, tendons, and ligaments along your lower legs and knees, sending strain rippling up toward your lower back.

Like 75 percent of us, Kennedy’s feet roll too far toward the centerline of his body — a biomechanical misstep called overpronation. “If you overpronate, it basically unlocks your foot so you have to recruit all the structures on the inside of your leg to compensate,” says Perry Julien, podiatry coordinator for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. The nastiest upshot of this is plantar fasciitis. If the foot’s rolling causes the arch to collapse, the band simply gets stretched too far and tears where it connects to the heel bone. At first you’ll get the bruising feeling that Kennedy ignored; later, you’ll get larger problems. Treated promptly, plantar fasciitis can be a slight annoyance rather than a crippling malady. The best advice, says Julien, is to slip on a pair of athletic shoes before you hop out of bed in the morning: The plantar fasciae tighten at night, so if you step flat on the floor first thing, you run the risk of re-straining them. As for treatment, try gently rolling your heel on a golf ball for a few minutes every day.

If you don’t overpronate, you might have the opposite problem: oversupination, the foot’s inability to rotate enough. These unlucky few — 4 percent of the population — have arches so high that they’re virtually incapable of absorbing shock. Aside from plantar fasciitis, oversupinators suffer the same host of problems as overpronators — tendinitis, stress fractures, strains — but in different areas of the feet. There’s little the medical world can do for these ailments, so the first-resort treatment is to follow the old rule of rest, ice, compression, and elevation (RICE). Give your feet a week of TLC, and if you’re still hurting, see a doctor.

Diagnose Thyself

Whatever the origin of your biomechanical woes, it’s crucial to know what you’re dealing with. So take a closer look at your trotters. To find out whether you overpronate or oversupinate, self-administer something called the wet test. Douse the bottoms of your feet and tread on a grocery bag (paper, not plastic) or a section of newspaper. If your footprint shows the full-width outline of your paw, you overpronate. If the print looks like it’s had a bite taken out at the arch, you have a normal foot. And if your footprint leaves an archipelagolike impression, with the ball and the heel separated like two distinct islands, or with only a thin isthmus connecting the two, you oversupinate.

Your best defense is to get the right shoes. Overpronators should bypass any shoe with a significantly curved last in favor of a straighter-soled, stable model with “motion control” features. You want dual-density midsoles (with soft rubber at the outside and firmer stuff under the arch), reinforced heel cups, firm carbon-rubber outsoles, and a last that’s either full- or three-quarter-length fiberboard. Beware of extra cushioning as well, for as great as it may feel, it can cause your feet to slop around. Oversupinators, however, need all the cushioning they can get, since their problem is dead shocks. And regardless of what problems your feet have, you need to make sure your athletic footwear fits properly (see sidebar at left).

While it’s always worthwhile to invest in good shoes, some people will need orthotics to correct their biomechanics. “It doesn’t hurt to start with the orthotics they sell at the drugstore,” says Julien. For an over-the-counter fix, he suggests that overpronators buy full-length arch supports made of neoprene or some other soft material. Oversupinators can go with any style, the only requirement being cushioning. “If you find that you still have pain,” he says, “you probably need to get a custom pair made.”

As for Kennedy, sturdy new shoes eased his affliction — but only after squandering an entire season. “Mentally it was very hard,” he says. “The rest of me was ready to train, but my feet were down — which meant that everything else was down, too.”

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Legwork for Sturdier Feet

Conditioning your lowest extremities requires that you pay heed to muscles beyond those that fit into your socks — namely, the hamstrings, calves, and their siblings in the legs, which are connected to points around the heels via powerful tendons. “You can’t think of your feet as separate entities,” says Lisa Schoene, a noted Chicago-area trainer and podiatrist who treats professional athletes at events such as the Chicago Triathlon. “They’re like puppets, and all the muscles in your legs are pulling their strings.” If those muscles are too tight or too weak, your feet don’t stand a chance. Tight calves and hamstrings, for instance, inhibit the feet’s range of motion and may cause them to overpronate. And if the leg muscles aren’t strong enough to absorb the shock from the heel strike, the feet’s smaller muscles and bones take the stress instead.

Thus a vigilant plan to fortify your feet includes stretching and strengthening the tiny, hard-working muscles of the feet as well as those that extend up the legs. The following set of exercises provides a complete regimen that you can do three times a week. Warm up for five minutes first — and of course, you’ll have to remove your shoes.Ìý

Stretches

The Mountain
This move asks a lot of both your hamstrings and calves. Stand with your feet spread at hip-width and keep your legs straight but not locked. Fold at the waist and place your palms down about three feet in front of you, just wider than your shoulders. Now, work to push your heels to the ground and drop your head. Hold for 30 seconds; repeat twice.

Calf Stretch
Sitting on the floor with both legs extended and your back straight, loop a rope around one foot. Flex the foot toward you, using the rope for gentle assistance at the finish of the stretch. Hold it for four seconds and then release; repeat 12 times with each leg.

Toe Squash
Kneel on the floor with the tops of your feet flat against the ground and sit back on them. Using your hands, push against the floor to lift your knees and balance your weight on the tops of your feet to stretch the muscles within. Hold for 30 seconds; repeat twice.

Strengtheners

Inch Worm
Sitting in a chair, spread a towel in front of one foot. Using only your toes, scrunch the towel up under your foot, drawing it in toward you until you’ve reached its end. Now reverse the process, pushing it out from under your foot. Do three sets of 12 repetitions with each foot.

Ankles Away
Sitting on the edge of a counter with your legs together, tie an exercise band around the tops of your feet (the tighter you tie it, the harder the exercise). Keeping your heels together, spread your forefeet apart, and then relax them. Next, tie the band around your feet with your ankles crossed. Push one foot out to the side, relax, and then repeat with the other foot. Do each exercise ten times.

Toe Raises
Wearing shoes and standing at a table for balance, slowly raise up on your toes. Ease yourself slowly back to the floor. Work up to one set of 100 repetitions.

Brenda DeKoker Goodman is an oversupinator and an avid runner and swimmer.

Marvelous as they are, these functional junctions of muscle, bone, ligament, tendon, and such are biomechanical accidents waiting to happen, accounting for 60 to 70 percent of athletic injuries, according to trainers. Tending to them, for an athlete, is something like tipping for a smart traveler: A show of consideration along the way keeps things running smoothly. Your joints undergo incredible forces — a 160-pound runner places up to 1,776 pounds of force on his knee with each stride — and they tempt other indignities as well. Poorly balanced muscle groups throw joints out of alignment, leading to inflammation and torn ligaments. Shoddy athletic technique and overuse beget tendinitis. And the inevitable klutzy move can harvest a sprain. What’s worse, a fluke injury can leave a joint permanently loose and interrupt nerve signals to the brain. Once your fitness starts unraveling at the joints, patching it back together becomes an all-encompassing task.

But not all is grim, despite a dusty nugget of sports-club wisdom that says you can’t strengthen joints. It’s true of ligaments, which tie bone to bone, but you can strengthen the muscles surrounding your hinges and bolster the tendons that connect those muscles to bone. To that end, we’ve provided a guide to shoring up your weak links. The joint-specific workouts that follow can easily be tacked onto an existing routine; mix and match to suit your sport. And in case your range of athletic interests leaves you wondering where to start, we’ve ordered the joints according to vulnerability. We’ve made sure to include exercises that work opposing muscle groups — quadriceps and hamstrings, for instance — which are especially important for joints. That way you’ll avoid muscle imbalances that can make all your efforts backfire.

Ankles

The ankle’s lot is not an easy one, what with all that teetering weight above and shifty ground below. Like an empty beer can supporting a great weight, it’ll hold up fine until it’s tweaked ever so slightly. Small wonder that ankle injuries — 85 percent of which are sprains, with most of the rest resulting from overuse — are the most common in sports. It’s a shame, too, says Dr. John C. Cianca, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Baylor College of Medicine: “Protecting the ankle is very simple.”

Begin by working the various muscles of your shin to guard against sprains and overuse injuries. “Many people are strong in the calves and weak in the front, an imbalance that often leads to a tight Achilles tendon,” Cianca explains. “That forces the anterior tibialis [at the front of the shin bone] to work harder, which can cause shinsplints.” Four simple exercises cover the bases: ankle inversion and eversion (twist your foot to either side against the tension of an exercise band), the toe raise (lie on the floor and cock your toes toward your shin, using the band as resistance), and the basic calf raise (with light weights).

Knees

The knee almost equals the ankle in first- to-crumple honors. Knee problems often stem from overuse, and consequently, any muscle imbalances in the knee will haunt you. Burly quads may be the grail of most any self-respecting outdoor athlete, but if you neglect your glutes and hamstrings, the stronger muscles will tug unevenly at the kneecap. The result? The biomechanical efficacy of the joint breaks down, creating pain that might lead you to favor your other leg, which overburdens its muscles and joints and breeds even thornier problems.

Classic leg extensions and leg curls balance each other well, but as concentric exercises they’re only half the story. They shorten muscles to build strength, but to brace your joints under pressure you’ll need muscle-lengthening eccentric work too, says Dr. Richard Simon, orthopedic surgeon and consultant to everything from U.S. Diving to the Red Clay Tennis Championships. “Eccentric strength is meant to slow down the joint and prevent too much motion,” he says. So the ideal leg workout requires you to do exercises in which you propel yourself in a controlled motion, such as the squat, lunge, vertical leap (jump onto a 12-inch-high box and then hop down), and jumping rope.

Shoulders

As the most mobile joint of the body, the shoulder is alarmingly vulnerable. Despite what you may have heard, the much-ballyhooed rotator cuff deserves little of the blame. “The rotator cuff is sort of a victim,” Cianca says. “It’s composed of small muscles in the shoulder joint, and it gets dumped on by muscles that aren’t doing their job.” A stronger cuff wards off dislocated shoulders, but building up the tangle of muscles surrounding your shoulder blade — the rhomboid, trapezius, subscapularis, and serratus anterior, if you’re taking notes — delivers better results. To strengthen those muscles around the shoulder blade, start with the classic push-up. The seated row, lateral arm raise, and military press help, too. But the most streamlined program includes the wall push-up (precisely what it sounds like), internal and external rotation (fold your forearm across or away from your torso while holding a taut band for resistance), and baby rattle (see photo, opposite bottom).

Elbows and Wrists

Elbow and wrist injuries slow down many a climber. Unlike the shoulder, no amount of strength training will protect your forearms in a fall. Nor will working out stop the wrist numbness that cyclists suffer, a result of gripping the handlebars, which compresses both the median (aka carpal tunnel) and ulnar nerves. But you can reduce the chance of an overuse injury here.

With some 26 intertwining elbow and wrist muscles, when one falters, others have to compensate, leading to muscle strain and inflammation of the joints. Tennis elbow, for instance, which can strike climbers as readily as Sampras wannabes, results from overloading muscles in your wrists. “Conveniently,” says athletic trainer Kevin Brown, a consultant to the American Sport Climbing Federation, “the forearm muscles support the wrists and the elbows.” So strengthening those muscles does double good. For your lower arms, combine the hand grip (squeeze a wad of sports putty), wrist curl, dumbbell rotation (twist the weight counterclockwise as you curl it), and triceps press-down (see photos, opposite top).

Hips

“The hip is a great joint because of its deep socket,” says osteopath Dave Jenkinson, team doctor for the U.S. Canoe and Kayak Team. “It’s very muscular and well protected.” Still, as the central link in the kinetic chain between the torso and legs, the hip warrants some attention. Underdeveloped or overtight hip muscles often lead to hamstring injuries, because if they tire, your body calls for backup from above and below. To target hip flexors, extensors, adductors, and abductors, try a regimen of bounding (leaping across a field in 50-yard stretches), hip flexion (see photo, left), and combinations of the adductor and abductor (stand and sweep your straight leg to either side, like a pendulum, against a taut band).

Matthew Segal, a Los Angeles-based writer, is rehabilitating a knee he sprained snowboarding.