Growing up as a young athlete in the 2000-2010s was quite the time. The programs to groom youngsters into prospective professionals started early, and they were bountiful to say the least. I wasn’t ever really a part of any of those, since I was a real pipsqueak for basically the entirety of my childhood, but I was always a commendable athlete despite it. I went into my freshman year of high school standing a diminutive 5 feet, 3 inches tall, and about 85 pounds in my heaviest Timberland boots. This was made all the more embarrassing because my older brother, who was a senior in the same building, towered over me, literally 16 inches taller. Luckily, I did end up hitting a buzzer beater with a high school growth spurt that placed me firmly outside of manlet territory, and qualified me for the 6-foot club with the rest of the males in my family.
Why did I tell you all of that? Framing. I grew 9 inches relatively quickly, all while playing sports with a strong passion. This, as a lot of you will know, came with the old growing pains. Patellar tendonitis, Osgood-Schlatter, the works. One thing I was blessed to narrowly avoid, however, is shin splints; an ever-looming specter in the realm of youth athletics. This is an ailment that is very poorly understood by a good number of (most) people involved in the training of young athletes. It’s one of those injuries that’s so ubiquitous that it’s assumed to be a nigh inevitability. Obviously, I’m here to let you know it absolutely doesn’t have to be that way.
Shin splints for the uninitiated, are sharp pains experienced in the shin, almost always during or after intense training or exercise. It’s generally associated with sprinting/running drills, and drills requiring quick, sharp changes in direction. What is often misunderstood about shin splints, mostly due to an incomplete understanding of muscular anatomy, is that it is not an injury of the bone itself. Generally speaking, shin splints are simply the colloquialized term for straining your tibiais anterior, which is a muscle that sits on the outside of your shin, and is a key part of the compliant spring mechanism that is the human leg. I don’t know about you, reader, but if I find that there is an epidemic of injury that seems to center around the straining of one key muscle group, I think it’s a sign something isn’t quite right.
Okay, so let’s just humor the uneducated fellow for a sec and have him explain himself. How in the hell are all of these guys just straining their shin muscles? Glad you condescendingly asked! Plain and simple, basically every athlete on the planet, once given a pair of running shoes, is just running incorrectly. Pair that with the intentionally exhaustive conditioning program that most competent coaches will put their teams through, and you essentially are just asking that tibialis to do something outside of its job description for too long.
Let’s, for a second, break down how to properly run so we can then understand where people seem to be going wrong. I referred to the leg as a spring mechanism earlier, and that’s because it literally is just that. Your hips, knees, and ankles are the fulcrums of a simple set of levers, where resistance and rebound are provided by tendons, ligaments, and muscles. The best way to maximally engage this spring when doing anything is to strike the ground at the forefoot or mid foot, allowing the interplay between your foot arches, Achilles’ tendon, calves, etc. to manage the force loads created by moving your body. When this is done properly, your toes will raise up prior to impact, then they will naturally descend as a function of engaging the calf. You can understand this concept by simply doing a calf raise. The act of utilizing the calf, by necessity, pushes the toes into the floor.
The running shoe issue comes into play in a very sneaky way, and I can honestly understand why it’s not generally considered as a problematic element. Here’s the deal. The running motion of an athletic human is very efficient. When barefoot, it’s not uncommon for the runner to lift their swinging foot mere fractions of an inch off the ground. This can be a problem when that efficient gait pattern is interrupted by the wiles of a shoe company’s foam cushioning systems. Cushioned shoes, especially those with an elevated heel, promoted a style of running known as heel striking. Where mid and forefoot strikers primarily handle impact forces through the structures of their foot, ankle, and a bent knee, runners who land heel first are experiencing that major impact force primarily through their knee and hip with a fully extended leg.
That action creates a whole gang of downstream problems, but we’ll focus on the way this style of running contributes to straining the tibialis anterior. When your weight is being managed at the forefoot with a bent knee, your tibialis and calf muscles are in a prime position to manage the force of your running body through your ankle. Your tibialis can raise your toes up in dorsiflexion, and your calves can push the toes down in plantar flexion. This distributes the burden of bringing the foot to the floor equitably between the two muscle groups. When heel striking, however, the mechanics are entirely screwed up. When your heel hits the ground, your calf is already at full extension, and your weight is positioned directly on the fulcrum it relies on to apply force through the toes. Your tibialis is in tight flexion, because it has to be in order to carry the foot through the gait without dragging the toes. This creates an issue. The toes need to be lowered to the running surface in order to continue the gait cycle, but the calfs are mechanically unable to do their job. This means the only option available to the body is to have your tibialis eccentrically lower the toes to the floor. That muscle is absolutely capable of that feat, but over reliance on that action will absolutely lead to injury. Most commonly, shin splints.
So what do I have in the way of solutions? The specific advice I would offer is going to be found in a later article for my paid subscribers. I have to justify the effort somehow. The simplest and easiest start, though, would be to just ditch the cushioned running shoes altogether. Especially in youth sports. Kids are very capable of growing and adapting to thrive in their environments. Leave their feet alone, and their bodies will strengthen them beyond your wildest imagination. The support and softness they need is from their parents and coaches, not their shoes.