Eliminating lower leg injuries w/ChiRunning®
Impact to the lower legs can happen in a variety of ways. Here are a few:
- Running in old, work-out running shoes
- Heavy heal striking
- Extended downhill running
- Running on an unstable surface (like snow or ice)
- Running on a treadmill
- Running on a side-sloping street
There are two main causes of shin splints (very common runner's injury); too much impact to the lower legs which is primarily created by heel striking and overuse of the lower legs while running. Overuse injuries primarily happen when you push off with your toes to propel yourself forward.
To reduce the amount of shock to your legs it is important to eliminate any heel strike while running. Heel strike happens when you run with your trunk upright and reach forward with your legs as you stride—commonly called over-striding. ChiRunning offers a way to eliminate heel strike by leaning forward from your ankles as you run, thereby allowing your foot to strike underneath or even slightly behind your body. This allows you to land on your mid-foot and your legs to swing to the rear as soon as your feet hit the ground, eliminating any heel strike.
Overuse of the lower legs: This is caused by pushing off with the toes, which in turn causes the calf and shin muscles to overwork. Anytime your body weight is supported by your toes, your calves and shins are required to do much more work than they were designed to do. In fact, if you're pushing off with your toes, you're actually increasing the workload to your calves and shins to be more than your body weight because you're pushing up against the downward pull of gravity. That's simply too big of a job for that relatively small group of lower leg muscles to handle. They'll get overworked and will eventually begin to complain in the form of soreness, inflammation and in some cases, become separated from the bone (the most painful version of shin splints).
Here are some other ways the lower legs can be overused. Beginning runners who are starting up a running program will often run too far or too fast before their legs are ready to sustain the distance or the speed they're running. Add to this the fact that almost all beginning runners push off with their toes, which increases the stress to their unconditioned legs, especially the shins. Many runners also start their runs too fast and don't allow their muscles to warm up enough before increasing their speed. Shin splints are also most likely to occur during track workouts involving speed intervals, and hill runs—both of which increase the amount of push-off with the toes.
Compared to your quadriceps, hamstrings and core muscles, the muscles in your shins (tibialis anterior) are relatively small and can be easily over-worked. So, the best solution to the overuse of the lower leg muscles is to not use them. With the ChiRunning technique, you engage the pull of gravity by leaning slightly forward, allowing your lower legs to relax while you run. By falling forward with the pull of gravity, there is really no need to be pushing yourself with your legs. All you really need to do is pick up your feet to keep up with your forward fall, which requires no lower leg muscles.
Try this. Stand in place and alternately pick your feet up off the ground. You'll see that it takes no lower leg muscles to pick up your feet. In fact you can let your legs just dangle from your knees while you're picking up your feet. See? No shin or calf muscles required. If you can do this while your standing, you can easily do the same thing while you're walking and eventually learn to do it while running. This is one of the basic principles of the ChiRunning technique—to run without using your lower legs for anything but momentary support between strides.
Adapted from ChiRunning-A Revolutionary Approach to Effortless, Injury-Fee Running