Lockdown Shin Pain
Hi, everybody, I hope the lockdown has been going well for you, or as well as it can go.
We’ve got a phenomenon that we’re going to call “lockdown shin”, or “COVID shin”. A lot of people have been doing a lot more walking since being in lockdown and we’ve had some reports of people coming in last time and then this time, we’ve also had some emails of people complaining of shin pain.
So I just wanted to talk very briefly about what it is and what you can do to try to help with the problem. So there is a problem that is usually associated specifically with walkers and it’s this anterior shin pain that runs down the front of the shin here.
So this muscle is used twice when your foot controls and decelerates foot slap, and then when it gets ground clearance and moves forward. Okay so this anterior shin area can become quite sore and overused with the walking, and it can become more of a problem even if you transition from running to walking. Alright, so what we want to try to do is we can massage out the belly of the muscle up in through here and so you can use a roller or you can just massage or ice massage that afterwards, after walking.
You also want to make sure that you’re not putting or lacing your shoes too tight around the front part of the ankle, because that’s an area where you can get impingement and pain. The other thing that you want to do is you want to make sure that your calves are tight. So if these are tight, it’s making this muscle down the front here work even harder. Alright, so you can do some calf stretches to really get some good dorsiflexion happening down at the ankle here to help with that problem.
The other thing that we can do is we can look at our shoes and if you just chuck me a shoe, we want to try and see try and make sure that we’re getting a shoe that’s got a reasonable amount of heel pitch and a good amount of curvature and rocker in through the forefoot here to allow you to move through that gate phase and not over stretch and stretch this area in through the front here.
We also want to make sure that the shoe is not deviating too much inwards or outwards and we want to make sure that the wear underneath the shoe is not excessive on one side or the other. So just some very brief things that we can do to try and help alleviate the anterior shin pain that is synonymous with increasing walking.
Hope that helps.