Those Gosh Darn Shin Splints
For many hurdlers, we are currently in that part of the year when shin splints are at their worst. A lot of sprinting, hurdling at full speed, hurdling in drills, and competing in races has led to chronic pain in the lower legs. While I’ve written about this topic before, I’d like to do so again in light of a recent “healing” that occurred with one of my hurdlers, courtesy of a fellow student who has studied under the tutelage of our athletic trainer for the past three years.
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Mike, the hurdler, was experiencing soreness in his shins, and it was starting to get worse. I was keeping him on the grass in workouts as much as I could, and even had him do the slower hurdle drills on the grass, but still the pain persisted.
Then one day a couple weeks ago he declared that he was pain-free.
“No shin splints?” I asked.
“Nope,” he said.
“They’ve gone away?”
“Yeah,” he nodded, “they’ve gone away.”
I couldn’t believe it. How? Shin splints don’t go away. They lessen in severity. They become manageable. But they don’t go away.
“Nasera massaged them out,” he explained.
Nasera was the sports medicine student. She also happened to be a thrower on our track team. I approached her at practice one day and asked her what she did to cure Mike’s shin splints. She explained it to me briefly, but I didn’t really understand. A few days later, during one of my planning periods at school, I interviewed her in more detail.
Firstly, Nasera explained that shin splints are caused by calcium buildup in the shins. “There’s a muscle,” she said, “that covers the calcium buildup, that pulls on it, and that’s the pain that you feel.”
The name of the muscle is the tibialis anterior. It is located on the lateral side of the tibia. According to Nasera, “it lies right on top of the calcium buildup.”
Calcium, an element in the hard part of bones, is needed for strong bones. But “if you get too much of it, it grows in one spot.” And the buildup in one spot is the source of the pain felt in shin splints.
When asked how running causes shin splints, Nasera explained that “your shin bends a little bit when you run. The muscle bends on the calcium buildup. More experienced runners are able to keep their muscle straighter so that the calcium buildup doesn’t occur.”
So, what did Nasera do to treat Mike’s shin splints?
“I broke apart the calcium buildups so the muscle had nothing else to rub on anymore,” she said.
How did she do that?
“I took skin lube and put it on his leg. I ran my finger up his shin, found the calcium buildups, and pressed on them.”
Nasera explained that the skin lube is a vaseline-like substance, the kind usually used to prevent chafing. She also explained that, when pressing on a calcium buildup, she would “hold it for like five or ten seconds, feel it release, then move on to the next one, and keep doing that.”
For the athlete, this is not a pleasant experience. “It’s very painful,” Nasera said, which is why someone with athletic training experience is needed to do it properly. Athletes couldn’t do it for themselves, because they would instinctively hold back from inflicting that type of pain upon themselves.
After the massage session, the final step would be to ice the leg. Nasera said that it takes a couple hours for the pain to settle out.
If an athletic trainer isn’t available, there are also self-maintenance options for the athlete. Nasera suggests that the athlete take a lacrosse ball rub it up and down the shin. A tennis ball isn’t hard enough, she says. Another option, which can be done in conjunction with the lacrosse ball, would be to then take an ice cup and rub it up and down the shin. The idea is to fill a paper cup with water, put the cup in the freezer. Once the water is frozen, take the cup out of the freezer, peel off the top of the cup, and then massage the shin with the ice cup. Nasera emphasizes that the ice cup treatment should not be done in isolation. “Don’t just do the ice cup,” she says, “Do it after the lacrosse ball.”
Finally, Nasera encourages athletes to do shin stretches to help get the muscle looser. In previous articles I’ve mentioned some of these stretches, such as sitting on the heels, walking on the heels, etc. Nasera warns, however, that such stretches only make the pain more manageable, but do not serve to make the pain go away. “Shin stretches help the muscle get looser,” she said, “but the buildup is still there.”
A final point that Nasera made is that shin splints are not caused by dietary deficiencies. Such assumptions, she says, are erroneous. “It has nothing to do with your diet,” she said. “Some people are more susceptible to it.”
Hurdlers, for obvious reasons, are among the most susceptible. The take-off and the landing at each hurdle puts a lot of pressure on the lower legs. She also said that women are more susceptible to shin splints than men. And that would fit my experience in my years as a coach. While both male and female hurdlers have suffered shin splints, the females’ pain tends to be more severe.
Honestly, I had never heard of massaging out shin splints with skin lube. I’m fairly certain that it’s probably not a new method, but I’ve never heard any athletic trainers or any other coaches mention it to me prior to Nasera. And Nasera has helped not only Mike, but also all the other sprinters and hurdlers on our team. They all say that her method is very painful, yet very effective. The shin splints go away, they say, so the temporary pain is worth it.
So, if you’re an athlete suffering from shin splints, or a parent or coach looking for help for your athletes who are suffering from shin splints, I would definitely ask your school’s athletic trainer about using this massaging method. It works.
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