Shin splints and shoe stability (Read 138 times)

Not sure if this'll help you...

Link.

I don't know about shin pain, but in 2010 I started getting knee pain that I had never experienced before.  My shoes (Brooks Adrenaline, a little more stability than the Inspires) were new, so I didn't think it was that my shoes had too many miles.  I went to the LRS and they put me in a shoe with a little less stability (the Inspires), and the knee pain went away.  Now, I didn't have a lot of miles on the Adrenalines, so after a week in the Inspires I decided to rotate the two, trying to get the full value for my money.  Nope.  The knee pain came back immediately.  I retired the Adrenalines and didn't look back.  Moral of the story: In my experience, too much stability can be as bad for you as too little.  Still, If it were me, I'd try to rotate the Inspires back in (just to get a couple more miles out of them).  If the shin pain comes back, you can always ditch them for good.

This was my experience exactly.  "Stability" / "motion control" shoes were bad news for me.

Not sure if this'll help you...

 

Link.

Huh. I'd heard about that study but hadn't read about it yet. I'm still not sure what to make of my own shoe situation.. I'd always been a member of the neutral shoe camp until the shin splints struck, and after strengthening my weak areas to no avail my PT, coach, and podiatrist all agreed that the next step for me was to try a more stable shoe.

Interesting at the end how they mention that so many injured runners are in shoes they don't find comfortable - that's my #1 priority when picking a shoe, it has to be comfortable out of the box.

Not sure if this'll help you...

 

Link.

An interesting article but I seriously suggest you take any article from newspaper, such as The New York Times (lately particularly TNYT), as opposed to more main-stream scientific articles--even Runner's World articles are probably more reliable than newspaper article (though they seem to use those newspaper articles anyway); more often than not, they (newspaper articles) are written with a set topic in mind by the author (like, "Ah!  I wanna write an article about how dangerous running can be!!") and that would set the tone on what "research" they would like to use.

That said, however, the content of this particular article is pretty much spot-on; of course, those concepts are nothing "new" at all.  Many people had been talking about it for ages (since 1970s as a matter of fact).  By the way, I listened to Dr. Leiberman's talk on a pod-cast (I think it's on at PaleoRunning.org at YouTube) and he sounded very smart (well, after all, he's a professor at Harvard!) and what he said makes a lot of sense.

Now, as some of you guys know (or recently found out), and somewhat the article insinuated, pronation is a natural occurrence.  It is almost--not ALL--unavoidable how our legs come out quite a bit outside the Center Line to the body and, in distance running, not so much in sprinting because of the much shorter time spent on your feet during the Support-Phase of running, we land pretty much on the Center Line--in other words, there's some level of "torque" created upon landing.  We have ankle and arch to take away pressure from "pronation" (because it happens).  Some times it looks so bad that it almost hurts to look at it!  So they (shoe manufacturers) decided it's a bad thing and, in the past 30 years, they had tried to develop shoes to prevent our feet from pronating.  For those past 3 decades, they had struggled to come up with a formula (a) to build up more material on the heel to alleviate the landing shock as well as (b) to stabilize the foot motion, particularly medial-lateral motion (i.e.: pronation and supination).  Mind you, these 2 (a and b) are contradicting phenomenons because the higher off you are from the ground, the less stabile you will become.  It's a simple fact and this is the very reason why the running shoes had become thicker and bulkier  AND stiffer.  This might actually answer a part of your question--yes, if the shoe is so thick (particularly the heel part) and the material is so soft, yes, you would be so much more wobbly.  It's like trying to stand on one of those big half rubber ball thingie (don't know the official name for it) on one foot.  It's a great supplementary exercise but you know that the less air in it, the softer it gets and the harder it will be to stand on it (because it gets wobblier).

Another issue with thick-heeled shoes is that, particularly if you're a heel-striker, it adds extra "distance" to the lever (from the tip of the heel to the end of your toes) and the "slapping" action (if you heel-strike) would send a vibration up to your shin and, as far as I'm concerned, this is one of the leading causes to "conventional" shin splint.  This is why many people develop shin splint going downhill too fast.  I don't exactly know the shoes (Inspires) but, from the on-line image of it, it looks pretty thick-heeled.  I don't  know if you're heel-striker or what but if your experience is such that you "sense" the shoe had caused a problem, I would stay away from it.  Wear them to walk around or for gardening.

Nobby, I've now read your post 3 times and spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about my feet and legs. Lots of food for thought, thanks for taking the time to reply. (I'm a scientist by trade so I'm never inclined to trust the media to report study results very accurately but I did think that particular article got the point across pretty well).

I'm a midfoot striker, but now I'm wondering if there's some other weird biomechanical thing I do that contributed to the shin splints in the first place that gets exaggerated when I wear certain shoes. Hm.

An interesting article but I seriously suggest you take any article from newspaper, such as The New York Times (lately particularly TNYT), as opposed to more main-stream scientific articles--even Runner's World articles are probably more reliable than newspaper article (though they seem to use those newspaper articles anyway); more often than not, they (newspaper articles) are written with a set topic in mind by the author (like, "Ah!  I wanna write an article about how dangerous running can be!!") and that would set the tone on what "research" they would like to use.

 

That said, however, the content of this particular article is pretty much spot-on; of course, those concepts are nothing "new" at all.  Many people had been talking about it for ages (since 1970s as a matter of fact).  By the way, I listened to Dr. Leiberman's talk on a pod-cast (I think it's on at PaleoRunning.org at YouTube) and he sounded very smart (well, after all, he's a professor at Harvard!) and what he said makes a lot of sense.

 

Now, as some of you guys know (or recently found out), and somewhat the article insinuated, pronation is a natural occurrence.  It is almost--not ALL--unavoidable how our legs come out quite a bit outside the Center Line to the body and, in distance running, not so much in sprinting because of the much shorter time spent on your feet during the Support-Phase of running, we land pretty much on the Center Line--in other words, there's some level of "torque" created upon landing.  We have ankle and arch to take away pressure from "pronation" (because it happens).  Some times it looks so bad that it almost hurts to look at it!  So they (shoe manufacturers) decided it's a bad thing and, in the past 30 years, they had tried to develop shoes to prevent our feet from pronating.  For those past 3 decades, they had struggled to come up with a formula (a) to build up more material on the heel to alleviate the landing shock as well as (b) to stabilize the foot motion, particularly medial-lateral motion (i.e.: pronation and supination).  Mind you, these 2 (a and b) are contradicting phenomenons because the higher off you are from the ground, the less stabile you will become.  It's a simple fact and this is the very reason why the running shoes had become thicker and bulkier  AND stiffer.  This might actually answer a part of your question--yes, if the shoe is so thick (particularly the heel part) and the material is so soft, yes, you would be so much more wobbly.  It's like trying to stand on one of those big half rubber ball thingie (don't know the official name for it) on one foot.  It's a great supplementary exercise but you know that the less air in it, the softer it gets and the harder it will be to stand on it (because it gets wobblier).

 

Another issue with thick-heeled shoes is that, particularly if you're a heel-striker, it adds extra "distance" to the lever (from the tip of the heel to the end of your toes) and the "slapping" action (if you heel-strike) would send a vibration up to your shin and, as far as I'm concerned, this is one of the leading causes to "conventional" shin splint.  This is why many people develop shin splint going downhill too fast.  I don't exactly know the shoes (Inspires) but, from the on-line image of it, it looks pretty thick-heeled.  I don't  know if you're heel-striker or what but if your experience is such that you "sense" the shoe had caused a problem, I would stay away from it.  Wear them to walk around or for gardening.

Interesting.  I'm a midfoot striker as well, and suffered from left leg-only shin splints a few weeks ago as well.   In my case, I suspect the injury resulted from the fact that, shortly before the symptoms arose, I was doing a lot of miles (not just intervals) on a track (dumb idea).   Always running the track counterclockwise, I believe I caused too much accumulated impact/torque/displacement/whatever on my lower left leg as I took the corner sections of the track too fast.  This is just my unscientific guess, but I can't think of a more likely explanation since ever since my leg healed up I've been putting in even more mileage on roads in the same Kinvara shoes with no major issues.

Oof. Yeah that'll give you some issues. I'm still running exclusively on the track but I change direction a lot to avoid stressing one side more than the other.

I think my Inspires will have to be retired for good - I'll see if anyone in my running club wants them. Just spent a few minutes walking around in them and my legs already feel weird, like they're forcing my foot outward and I'm fighting against them. No bueno.

Reviving a thread from 8 years ago???