What Causes Lower Leg Pain?
There are various reasons why you might get lower leg pain, shin splints being one of them. If you happen to do a lot of high impact sports that involve a ton of sudden turns and running and if you are a very active person in general, the overall inconvenience of such lower leg pain could prove to be a complete nightmare and turn into a chronic injury.
However, just because you aren’t a regular athlete doesn’t mean you can’t suffer from lower leg pain. If you do a lot of exercise too fast after being sedentary, this could be another common cause of lower leg pain. If you join a running club after being extremely inactive for several years and if you try to keep the pace with regular runners the minute you start, you could also suffer from lower leg pain.
Two kinds of lower leg pain exist: posterior and anterior. Feel your lower leg down the front and try to find the edges of a bone that is near the surface (similar to a school ruler); this would be your tibia’s edge. Lower leg pain could get caused by muscle inflammation near the tibia. When these get inflamed, they pull on connecting tissues that attach them to the bone, which produces the nagging lower leg pain.
Anterior lower leg pain could get caused by activities that require sudden starts, stops, and turns with speed, such as basketball and football. Although most footballers are huge and hefty and weigh about 200 pounds, the overall strain on their small shin muscles would still be immense. In general, though, sports players are usually fit. If you happen to be unfit and decide to run 10k races out of nowhere and without the required gradual build-up, you would have higher chances of getting anterior lower leg pain.
Posterior lower leg pain happens on the shinbone’s other side and is most likely caused by bad posture while running. The primary culprits here would be tight calf muscles and flat feet, which usually cause imbalances in the muscles. One thing you should do if you suffer from this type of lower leg pain would be to get on a treadmill and have somebody watch you run. Have them watch out for your feet landing flat or rolling out and your knees moving in, which usually happens with women due to their wider pelvis. This could also cause lower leg pain.
When it comes to anterior lower leg pain, it would be recommended to join rehabilitation programs that involve non-impact cardio training like cycling or rowing to maintain or rebuild fitness before gradually introducing activities related to sports again.
Posterior lower leg pain would require postural and core muscle strengthening. It would therefore be recommended to focus on exercises for leg strengthening or Pilates on a one-to-one basis to address the imbalances that might have caused the lower leg pain to begin with.
Both kinds of lower leg pain in their acute stages should be treated with ice and rest. Also, you always have to warm up prior to exercising and stretch after exercising. Like with the majority of injuries out there, prevention would be much easier than the cure, though; keep this in mind!