Golf Podiatry in MelbourneYour Swing Starts on the Ground

Directly, and more than most golfers expect. The swing is a rotational movement anchored at the feet. If the trail-side big toe cannot extend fully, you cannot push through cleanly. If the lead foot slides or pronates at impact, you lose the ground you were pushing against.

The body does not stop swinging when a joint runs out of range - it finds the movement somewhere else, usually the lead knee or the lumbar spine. That is why big toe stiffness so often turns up as a back complaint.

Because a round is eight to ten kilometres of walking on firm, cambered ground, in a shoe built for torsional stiffness rather than cushioning, while you carry or push a bag. That is a substantial load, applied slowly, which is exactly the profile that produces overuse injury rather than acute injury.

Pain that settles overnight is a load message. Pain that greets you the next morning, or that arrives earlier each round, is worth assessing - most commonly it is plantar fasciitis or forefoot compression.

Yes, and golf shoes are actually more accommodating than most sports footwear because the removable liner is usually generous. We manufacture custom orthotics specifically for spiked and spikeless golf shoes, built slim so they do not lift your foot out of the heel counter.

Worth saying plainly: plenty of golfers do not need them. If the problem is a narrow forefoot and four hours of walking, the answer is a wider shoe and a walking-load plan, not a device.

Yes, and usually before it affects comfort enough to complain about. Golfers unconsciously adjust their address position, weight distribution and finish to avoid a painful structure. The adjustment is small and it is completely invisible to the player making it.

The result is inconsistency you cannot explain - a swing that works on the range and abandons you on the course, or a strike pattern that has drifted over two seasons. Treating the foot often restores the mechanics before the player has noticed they were lost.

No. Podiatrists are primary contact practitioners, so you can book directly without seeing your GP. Private health rebates apply with extras cover and can be claimed on the spot through HICAPS at all three clinics.

A referral is only needed if you are accessing a Medicare Chronic Disease Management plan through your GP, which is a separate pathway and not typical for a sports presentation.

There is no single best shoe, and anyone who names one is guessing. What matters for a fascia under load is a shoe with adequate heel cushioning, a modest heel-to-toe drop, and enough midsole to reduce the ground-reaction spike across ten kilometres of walking.

Many modern spikeless golf shoes are effectively firm trainers and work well. Very flat, very flexible shoes tend not to. Bring your current pair to the appointment - the wear pattern tells us more than the model name does.

Yes, though it is important to be honest about what help means. Nothing straightens a bunion - not an insole, not a splint, not a toe spacer. The deformity is structural.

What we can do is remove the pressure that makes it hurt for four hours: shoe width and last-shape guidance, targeted padding, toe spacers, and offloading. For most golfers that is the difference between an unbearable round and an unremarkable one.

Almost always the peroneal tendons. At impact your lead foot has to resist rotation while your entire body turns over it, and the peroneals are the structure doing that resisting - loaded eccentrically, at speed, once per swing.

A shoe with poor lateral support makes it worse, because the foot slides and the tendon takes over the job the shoe should be doing. Read our guide to peroneal tendinopathy.

It depends on how irritable the tissue is, which is something we can measure rather than guess. The useful rule is the twenty-four hour rule: if pain the morning after is worse than the morning before, the load was too high.

Most golfers can keep playing something. Reducing range volume, using a cart for part of a round, or splitting eighteen holes into nine is nearly always better than a total lay-off, because fascia responds to managed load and not to rest.

For persistent cases, yes. Shockwave therapy is well supported for plantar fasciitis and Achilles tendinopathy that have not responded to loading and footwear changes over several months.

It is not a first-line treatment and it is not a substitute for strength work. We use it where the tissue has been symptomatic long enough that it needs a stimulus to restart a stalled healing response, alongside the loading program - not instead of it.