3 min read

Gopi Kang

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Education

3 Ways to Prevent Shin Splints


We’ve all had them at one point.
Shin splints can be the downside to a new workout regime.

As we come into the warmer months, our time spent being active increases and so does the risk of shin splints.


It’s estimated that 20% of the population experiences shin splints, increasing as we age. Preparing your body and understanding the causes of shin splints is the key to preventing pain.



3 Ways To Prevent Shin Splints
If you’ve been increasing your walks and runs, you may need to reduce or break up your volume. Do your best to not increase distance by more than 5% per week. Having an appropriate warm-up, mobility, strength, and recovery routine will do wonders for your shins.

Mobility: Ensuring minimal tightness at the Achilles tendon, posterior calf muscles, and anterior shin muscles is key to minimizing shin splints. Focus on exercises to maximize your range. Try maximal rotations of the ankle, as well as calf stretches.

Strength: Weakness with the posterior calf muscles may lead to overuse of the shin muscles. Focus on strengthening the soleus, gastrocnemius muscles, tibialis posterior muscles, and tibialis anterior.

Warm-Up and Recovery: Foam rolling along the back of the calf muscles and front of the shin can provide stimulus to these muscle groups. This allows relaxation and nourishment to the muscle group with increased blood flow, pain relief, and improvement in range of motion.

Finally, hands-in therapy involving joint mobilizations along the ankle, tibia, as well as myofascial treatments can provide relief of surrounding tissues contributing to shin splints. Using these ways to prevent shin splints will ensure you stay active all season long!




What Are Shin Splints?
Shin splints are an overuse and repetitive stress injury at the shin. It happens when the muscles surrounding the tibia (the larger lower leg bone) cannot recover or heal in response to repetitive contractions like walking, running, or hiking. Shin splints are medically known as medial tibial stress syndrome (they can also exist as anterior tibial stress syndrome).

They are a common complaint amongst runners new and old – nearly 70% of runners experience them. Those experiencing it will often complain of dull, aching pain during and after activity. What makes shin splints odd for many is that they can be experienced and eased during activity, only to persist as a dull achy pain for days. People that walk for leisure and exercise can also experience shin splints.


What Do Shin Splints Feel Like?
Shin splint pain is either felt at the front, middle, or side of the shin. This means you either feel pain along the thick muscle along the outside of your shin bone or around the large ankle bone along the side of the foot. Most commonly the pain is felt at the bottom third of the shin.

For many, pain along the shin will increase at the beginning of a new activity, and ease with movement. Pain also tends to be the worst for most people after their activity. 24-48 deep dull aches are the average symptom.






How Do Shin Splints Happen?
It’s thought that shin splints occur due to repetitive microtrauma to the muscle or tendon. This leads to a point where the ability to recover and heal is outpaced by stress and inflammation of the muscle group.

Increased walking or running volume, speed, and surface changes like concrete or trails, can all lead to these microtraumas.


Need Help With Your Shin Splints?
Book a session with me! I’ll assess your movements and set you up on a FutureProof plan to increase your mobility, reduce pain and prevent injury.

Book your session today

3 min read

Janny Chan

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Education

Test Your Hip Mobility


How tight are your hips?
Test your hip mobility with these simple exercises.

Stiff hips may be an early indicator of arthritis.
Here’s what you need to know.


It’s estimated that roughly 10% of the population experiences some form of hip pain, increasing as we age. Hip stiffness is often the first sign of impending hip pain.

Understanding the characteristics of tight hips and what you can do to help is the key to preventing pain.


5 Ways To Test Your Hip Mobility
Here are a few movements you can do to test your hip mobility.

These movements are best reviewed with a physical therapist, chiropractor, or massage therapist. Doing the tests yourself will give you an indication of your hip’s mobility and stiffness.

Squat Test: sink into a squat, and attempt to shift side-to-side. You may find one hip feeling more tension than the other.

Internal Rotation: lay on your back, bring your knees to a 90 degree angle, and rotate the feet outwards. This is the internal rotation of the hip. Compare range and feel side-to-side.

External Rotation: lay on your back, and bring one knee to a 90 degree angle. Keeping the thigh still, rotate your foot inwards. This is the external rotation of the hip. Compare range and feel side-to-side.

Flexion: lay on your back, with your legs flat. Bring one knee towards your chest. This is flexion of the hip. Compare range and feel side-to-side.

Extension: lay on your stomach, legs flat on the ground. Keep your knees straight, bring one leg off the ground. This is a hip extension. Compare range and feel side-to-side.




3 Common Reasons For Hip Stiffness
The hip is a highly mobile joint that relies on cartilage, bone, muscles, and nerves to work together. Each one of those components may contribute to feeling stiff in the hip.

Nerves: the ability to rotate the hip, and move it into adduction and abduction is limited by the mobility of the major nerves of the hip and thigh. Issues with major nerves of the hip build up over time due to movement, postural habits and/or a lack of mobility.

Muscles: your muscles and tendons are the most common sources of hip stiffness. Many office workers and athletes may complain of “hip flexor” stiffness or “glute stiffness”. The stiffness here may coincide with weak muscles, decreased range of motion in certain directions, and pain with use.

What starts off as stiffness and a pinch can become a chronic issue if not appropriately addressed. Hip pain can often feel like a pulling, cramping, or sharp pains at the front, back, and side of the hip. These will often be aggravated by general movements like sit-to-stands, side-to-side movements, running, or even walking.

Joint: cartilage damage (e.g. labrum of the hips) or surface degeneration of the articulating bones, “wear-and-tear” at the hip joint leads to significant reductions in the range of motion..

With joint issues, hip stiffness and pain are often felt deep in the groin. This pain is not palpable, meaning massage (or any other similar intervention) brings no temporary relief. There may be clicking, locking, or a feeling of “catching” at the hip. Athletic movements and stair climbing get more and more difficult.

Those with arthritis feel stiffness in the morning, continuing with aggravation and groin pain throughout the day, making a simple walk very difficult.



What Can I Do About My Hip Stiffness?
Regardless of the causes of your hip stiffness, understanding which movements are restricted or painful and what activities are limited is important to know moving forward. Thankfully, movement and exercise routines deliver amazing outcomes for hip stiffness.

Physical therapy can guide your hip mobility, and start creating movement goals. Along with massage therapy and chiropractic treatment, manual therapy techniques such as joint mobilizations and myofascial techniques provide relief for hip stiffness.



Want To Have FutureProof Hips?
Book a session with me! I’ll assess your movements and set you up on a FutureProof plan to increase your mobility, reduce pain and prevent injury.

Book your session today

2 min read

How To Fix Your Tight Hips

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Education

How To Fix Your Tight Hips

If your job requires you to sit all day, chances are you’ve complained about having tight hips a few times throughout the week. Here is your 6 step guide to unlocking your hips.

The tight hip sensation you feel is just a manifestation of your body sending signals to your brain to move the body part/joint around. If you continue to ignore those messages, your tight hips will only get worse.

The awareness and sensations become hard to discern, and you may feel confused on whether you are doing the activity right or wrong. Having self-awareness will help you understand when it is time to have a health care professional coach you through the next steps.

Here is when a Myodetox Therapist can provide you with solutions according to your individual needs, to move you along your progressions through the use of our manual therapy and movement education techniques.

So how do you tackle tight hips?

Try out some of these hip drills and exercises to regain the ranges of motion you have lost throughout the years. 

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1. Warrior Pose – Get into a one line stance by bringing one foot back and bending the front knee until you feel a comfortable stretch in the hip and quad of the back leg.

2. Downward Dog – Bend forward to place your hands firmly on the ground. Walk your hands out until you get into a tolerable pike position.

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3. Low Lunge Quad Stretch – Get into a one line stance and place one knee on the ground. Reach back to grab the foot of the leg that is on the ground. Pull that foot towards your buttock until you feel a tolerable stretch in the quad of the same leg.

4. Hip Opener stretch – While in a lunge position extend the back leg keeping your knee of the ground. Bring both hands firmly on the floor inside the front leg. Use your elbow to drive the knee out until you feel a comfortable stretch in the groin/hip of the front leg.

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5. Pigeon Stretch – Bring one shin on the floor in front of you with your opposite leg straight back behind you. Place your arms or forearms on the ground in front of you, whichever is more comfortable. Anteriorly tilt your pelvis by sitting up tall and bringing you tailbone towards the sky. Lean forward until you feel a comfortable stretch in the hip of the leg that is in front of you.

6.Cross-legged Arm Reach – Cross your legs in front of you and reach towards the sky. Take one hand and bring it over your head to try to touch the opposite shoulder blade. Take the other hand behind the back and try to touch the opposite shoulder blade.

3 min read

A Weak Butt Causes Hip Pain

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Education

A Weak Butt Causes Hip Pain

If you’re feeling hip pain, it’s probably because you’re not walking around enough, and you’re not activating your butt enough.

If you’re not texting on your phone, you’re sitting at your desk hunched over, working away on your laptop. Time flies, and next thing you know, you’re getting up for a walk, but only after a couple hours have passed.

Although you’re working hard, you’re not working your butt enough. And even though you may not feel any pain now, the mid-day walk to grab lunch will eventually catch up to your hips.

To get a better idea how your butt is related to your hip pain, allow us to explain.

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This important group of muscles do this as their major actions:
Medius: abducts the hip (hip to the side)
Maximus: extends the hip (pulls the thigh behind you)
Minimus:abducts the hip (hip to the side)

These important muscles are often weak and underworked. So many of our jobs require us to sit for prolonged periods of time. The lack of mobility causes our gluten to “turn off” or stop firing as effectively. Once our glutes stop firing, we start developing imbalances within the hip which can lead to aches and eventual hip pain.

When building strong glutes, you can expect to see some of these things happen along the way:

Alleviate back pain: Learning to contract your glutes in a multitude of ranges can alleviate a lot of the mechanical back pain you are currently experiencing. Your glutes work to stabilize the pelvis and keep the hip joint centered. When they’re strong, your lower back doesn’t need to compensate and take excessive mechanical stress.

Increase performance: If you want to maximize your athletic potential, squatting should be a top priority. Stronger glutes will improve your speed, agility, and jumping skills, and quick side-to-side movements. Every time you take a step, your glute max stabilizes your pelvis, making transitions into movements safe on your pelvic joints and ultimately your back.

Abolish knee pain: A strong glute medius keeps the pelvis stable and prevents swaying from side to side. When your pelvis isn’t stable, it puts a lot of excessive pressure on your knees and ankles. When your glutes are strong, it helps to maintain proper alignment of the knee, hip and ankle. This natural alignment keeps your knee from hurting by tracking the knee cap properly.

Try out these 3 movements and see if you can hold the positions for 1 minute each with total control.

This will give you a good indicator of how well your glutes are doing.

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Kick backs

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Single leg bridges

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Side Clamp

2 min read

Myodetox

Posted on

Education

Your Knee Pain, Lower Back and Hip Pain is Because of Your Feet

Improper foot care plays a vital role in the causes of knee pain, reasons for lower back pain, and overall hip pain. Our feet and its arches are the foundations that our entire body relies on to keep us moving and standing.


Our feet are designed to provide us with flexibility, absorb shock, distribute the weight of the body, and help us adapt to our environment when walking, running, climbing, etc. They allow us to move where we want to go, balance us when we stand – yet, we neglect the necessity for proper foot care!

Poorly fitted shoes, old worn out shoes, and jobs that require more time seated than standing are the culprit of foot problems. As a result, it may be the initiating factor to what causes hip problems, lower back pain, and knee pain.

Like any part of the body, our feet needs exercise too.

Strong foot muscles help hold the bones of the feet and ankles in alignment and assist in maintaining our arches. If the muscles aren’t working properly to keep this alignment, there’s a pretty good chance that nothing stacked above is aligned correctly either.

Here are two very simple exercises you can do on a daily to get your feet healthy and working for you:

elias

  1. Place a towel flat on the floor and use your foot to bring the towel towards you. elias
  2. Drop pens, pencils, marbles or whatever you have at home and pick them up using your foot and toes and place them in a bucket.

A lot of shoes and foot orthotics are now designed to do the work. While the extra support can be a benefit and a saving grace from pain, we may be relying on them too much and forgetting that we already have the proper equipment.

Since you already have your feet, train them and use them. They are the best pair of shoes you’ll ever have! Relying on orthotics and shoes is like putting on a strap-on. Why use something when you’ve already got the goods?

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