Every once in a while, I’ll go for a run and immediately feel some nagging soreness in my lower legs. I always know the culprit for the pain: shin splints. Luckily, my successful formula for relieving those leg aches is pretty simple.
With years of running, I’ve discovered that discomfort in my shins typically signals that it’s time for a new pair of trainers or a training week with reduced volume. Once I make some tweaks to my footwear and training plan, my shin splints almost always go away within a few days. But not every instance of shin splints can be quickly treated with a shoe swap or mileage modification.
Depending on the severity of your symptoms, your shin splints could require medical attention and a longer recovery period. Your pain may even be due to an injury entirely different from shin splints—something I once learned the hard way. So when should you make a trip to the doctor’s office for a bout of shin splints?
Shin splints are one of the most common overuse injuries runners face, and differentiating between a mild case and a severe one requires staying in tune with your pain and recognizing red flags. Shin splints, or medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS), is an injury characterized by pain in the lower front part of the leg, usually right along the tibia. Usually, shin splint pain occurs while running or walking, but goes away once you stop your activity.
When you first start going, it's going to fade a bit, maybe go away and then it's going to be worse the more you're doing.” What’s typically to blame for shin splints? It’s classified as an overuse injury—or a condition caused by incorporating too much volume or intensity into your training—but other factors can put you at risk of developing shin splints: If your shin pain lessens as you warm up into your runs, and your symptoms disappear once you complete your miles, you can usually manage your injury with a modified training plan, rehab exercises, stability shoes and arch supports, cross-training, or massaging and foam rolling. And the less severe the shin splints, the shorter the recovery timeline typically is—sometimes as brief as one to two weeks.
Whenever I experience mild shin pain, I always pose two questions to myself: How many miles have I completed in my current running shoes, and have I made any significant increases in my training load? If I’ve put nearly 500 miles on my shoes, or have taken note of a recent increase in mileage or intensity in my training, I know that based on my injury history, the lower leg pain is likely a simple case of shin splints. I’ll switch into a fresh pair of training shoes, dial back my volume and workout intensity, and incorporate shin exercises into my strength training to relieve the pain.
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