Shin Splints

[Bales]

@UnlimitedSteel

After a long bout of shin splints, I came to the following conclusion: Orthotics are merely a crutch. Pick up a pair of Nike Free 3.0’s, and just start off by wearing them around for a few weeks. Do some light jogging in your regular running shoes a few days a week. After say, 2-3 weeks, or when wearing Nike Frees around feels okay, start doing light warm up drills in your Nike Frees before doing light jogs in your regular running shoes. After a few more weeks, you should be able to start doing everything in the Nike Frees, but still keep the intensity down. Build up over the course of a couple months.

This is what I did, and my shin splints are gone. No special calf/shin exercises, no massage, no stretching, none of that. Maybe that’s just me, but I’ve made so many threads on this site about shin splints that there will most definitely be at least one person reading this post who knows how much I cried back in the day.

Seriously, give this a shot. I wouldn’t want anybody to suffer as long as I have.

Also, as of late I’ve taken aerobic condition more seriously. I prefer beginning with a low impact warmup (elliptical), then do my warm up run, etc, all before my sprint workout. This could play a role in recovery

The problem with saying that orthotics are just a crutch how do you overcome overpronation?

Are you saying that you can unflatten arches? Some people naturally have flat feet and in that case over pronation causes the shockwaves when running to travel up the shin rather than at an angle away from it, and tires all the lower leg muscles in having to over compensate for this.

I suffer badly from shin splints and am specifically focusing on my tibialis posterior and strengthenging all my lower leg and foot muscles/tendons etc…but I do also have orthotics which I need to wear aswell.

I do think that for some people an orthotic is needed due to the way in which their body naturally is.

It depends on whether your problems are down to a weakness in the lower leg muscles which can be sorted, or whether it is down to being flat footed/ dropped arches or over pronated naturally.