By Sarah Whitmore, Sports Recovery Specialist — 9 years of experience with young athletes
⏱ 8 min read
Hi, my name is Sarah Whitmore. For the past 9 years, I've been working with young athletes aged 7 to 14, helping them recover from sports injuries.
In my clinic, I see two types of parents every week. The first ones come in because their child has just started complaining about heel pain. The second ones — and these are the majority — have already tried everything: rest, ice, insoles, physiotherapy, anti-inflammatories, even shockwave therapy. And the pain still keeps coming back.
If you're reading this, you're probably one of them.
Heel pain in active children (known as Sever's disease) affects 1 in 5 active kids aged 7 to 14, both boys and girls. And what most parents don't know is this: the reason nothing has worked yet isn't because you haven't tried hard enough. It's because nothing you've tried actually addresses the real cause.
Let me show you the 5 reasons why your child's heel pain isn't really going away — and what finally breaks the cycle.
When your child rests, the inflammation calms down. The pain fades. You think it's over.
Then they go back to training. And within 2 to 3 weeks, the pain is back.
Why? Because rest doesn't fix the mechanical cause. It only removes the impacts temporarily. As soon as your child runs, jumps, or pivots again, the same forces hit the same fragile zone — and the cycle starts all over.
This is why 80% of children relapse within 3 weeks of returning to sport. Rest is a pause button, not a solution.
Football boots, gymnastics slippers, basketball trainers, athletics spikes, dance shoes — every sport shoe has one thing in common: none of them protect the heel.
With every stride, the heel takes up to 8 times your child's body weight. For a 32 kg child, that's 256 kg of pressure per impact. And in a 1.5-hour session, the heel absorbs 800 to 1,200 impacts.
None of these shoes are designed to absorb that force at the heel. That's normal — they're built for performance, not to protect a growing cartilage.
As long as this daily aggressor stays in place, no treatment can hold. You clean a wound, and the next day the wound is reopened.
That's reason #2 why it never really goes away.
Between the ages of 7 and 14, your child's heel isn't a solid bone yet. It's a growth plate — a soft, highly vascularised zone of cartilage that's still developing.
Unlike adult bone, this zone is fragile, flexible, and extremely sensitive to repeated impact. Every shock travels straight into a structure that simply isn't built to handle it yet.
That's why heel pain at this age behaves so differently from heel pain in adults. And it's why time alone won't fix it — as long as the cartilage is still growing, the zone stays vulnerable to every single foot strike.
Your child isn't fragile. Their heel is just still under construction.
Here's something most parents never hear from their GP: the Achilles tendon attaches directly onto the growth plate.
During growth spurts, the bones grow faster than the tendon can stretch. The result? The Achilles becomes relatively shorter, and it pulls non-stop on the very zone that's still developing.
Every step, every jump, every landing adds roughly 1,000 micro-tractions per session on the cartilage. It's like a tug-of-war happening inside your child's heel, every single day.
This is why stretching alone isn't enough, and why the pain persists even when your child isn't doing high-impact activity. The tendon never stops pulling — even when they're walking to school.
Look at every solution you've probably tried:
| Solution | When it acts |
|---|---|
| Rest | By removing impacts |
| Ice | After the session |
| Anti-inflammatories | After the pain |
| Insoles / heel cups | Partially, but not on the rear heel zone |
| Physiotherapy | Between sessions |
| Shockwave therapy | Outside of effort |
Notice the pattern? Not a single one acts DURING the impact. They all act before, after, or in between — never at the exact moment the heel takes 256 kg of pressure.
And that's precisely the moment where the damage happens. As long as no solution protects the heel during the impact itself, the pain will keep coming back.
After years of seeing the same parents come back with the same frustrated face, I started looking for something that finally ticked the 5 essential criteria:
✓ Worn during sport (not just at rest)
✓ Covers the rear heel zone where the pain lives
✓ Absorbs the impact at the exact moment it happens
✓ Stabilises the Achilles tendon to reduce traction
✓ Thin enough to fit inside any sport shoe
That solution is Kintex — a compression sleeve I tested on 12 children in my clinic before recommending it more widely. 4 out of 5 children were pain-free within 2 to 3 weeks. Today, over 6,000 UK parents use it for their kids.
"14 months. That's how long my son Leo struggled with heel pain. He plays football and we'd tried everything — rest, insoles, even private physio. Four weeks after starting Kintex, he scored a goal and ran to me shouting 'Mum, it doesn't hurt anymore!' I cried right there on the touchline."
"I'd already spent over £380 in 8 months on appointments, insoles, and 'recovery' trainers. Nothing worked. Chloé was crying before every gymnastics session. Then we tried Kintex. Four months later, she was selected for the regional championships. I genuinely can't believe this little sleeve did what specialists couldn't."
"My daughter Léa was limping after every training. I thought we'd have to stop gymnastics altogether. After 3 weeks with Kintex, the limping was gone. After 6 weeks she was back on the beam — and now she begs me to take her to training. That sleeve gave her back her sport."
Join over 6,000 parents who have broken the cycle of pain
