Shin Splints

[RennaDanGym]

I took DD to the doctor on Monday for her shin splints. The good news is that there is no stress fracture, but she has a bad case of shin splints. She has been dealing with these for over a year, and nothing seems to be working. She broke her foot two months ago and had to take 6 weeks off and they went away. However now that she is training again they have come back. Dr said to ice, take advil, and wear a compression sleeve. The compresssion sleeve is not helping signficantly and they are still really hurting on vault and floor.

How do y'all typically treat these? Anything she can do to make them go away? She is doing streches and excercises for them. The excercises are toe raises, and reverse toe raises, the abc's with her foot, and flexing/pointing her feet with a theraband. I am thinking of taking her to a lady who does rolfing. Anybody have any experience with this?

 

[Deleted member D3987]

you don't say how old she is or what level. but 1 year is considered chronic. they must place her on a once a week vault and once a week tumble schedule until she feels 0 pain. this is 1 of those things that you must 'pay now' by reducing repetitions or else you 'pay later' in the form of chronic stress fractures that will not heal until well after one leaves gymnastics. rolfing or bar massage works well as it increases blood flow to the area.

 

[BlairBob]

I have been told the same thing by one of my mentors.

High volume lower limb work. Roughly 150-450 heel/toe raises. Start at 75-150. A lot of this is probably is probably to just get bloodflow through tissue.

 

[Mack_the_Ripper]

It could also be exacerbated by certain things in her strength regime. If there are certain skills/exercises that make her shins splints hurt, she should not do them or find an alternate exercise that does not hurt. For example, I developed shin splints when our strength included a lot of one-legged jumps from a hurdle onto hip-high mats as well as two-legged jumps from a stand. When these are not in our strength (we have rotating lists) I do not have shin pain.