Heel Pain

Pls reduce the stress and visit a doctor first ! The following are just my personal experiences.

I got heel pain now too (two weeks), getting more intense after each badminton session. I think, that is was a result of higher training intensity (more shadow footwork, more focus on lifting the heel from the floor). From my past experiences, whenever I increased the intensity, something else started to hurt. My previous area of pain was the achiles tendon, which got more intense after each training session too, now I guess the plantar fascia.

Take a look at this pic:

The heel is connected to two tissues, the achiles tendon and the plantar fascia. Badminton with a lot of powerful movement and hopping/jumping will put a lot of stress to these two, because they are both strained together when you lift the heel. Once you start doing some researches, you will read that a lot of badminton player have issues with either their achiles tendon or heel, or both.

Damage to the tissues is often a result of too much stress (no sudden pain, but the pain get stronger from time to time). To reduce the stress to my achiles tendon I already bought some new insoles, started much more streching of my calves. It got a lot better over a course of roughly 1-2 months. Now I will try to reduce the stress to my plantar fascia first, that is, reduce shadow footwork, use a golf ball to self massage the plantar fascia (see youtube for tutorial videos) and doing some more sugguested stretching.

From my other issues I got with other sports over the years, which are golfer elbow(right arm), tennis arm (left arm), right shoulder , I have made the following experiences:
1. Just continue as always does not work at all (was not willing to reduce training intensity, which is really dumb).
2. Just resting does not work either .
3. Reducing stress, but continue to use it carefully, worked ().

My personal explanation is:
When you stress a tissue too much, it gets damaged and starts to hurt. The pain is a signal of your body to let it rest for some time, but pain is just an other stimulus the body get used to too. So I believe, that after the tissue has healed, a low stimulus is still enough to trigger some pain. So, by slowly starting the movement again, increasing the stress level step by step , your body will get used to the stimulus again and the pain will vanish, still it needs some time to heal first.

I got this opinion after my last shoulder injury (weighttraining). After I injured it, I was not able to stress it at all. So I waited and probed it from time to time without any success, the pain did not go away. After several month and with a lot of frustration I started to train the shoulder with much less weight and voila, the pain was completely gone after two weeks and I was able to train with the weight I used before the injury. I believe, that at that time, the shoulder was already healed, but still very sensitive to stress, resulting in pain under stress.