The BEST Shin Splints Exercises to Fix Shin Pain

Are you dealing with shin pain? Then you probably want to find out, what the best shin splints exercises look like. I’ve worked with many athletes before, who had this problem, and I will tell you exactly what we did (including all the exercises and progression).

The Best Shin Splints Exercises

When considering exercises, I first have to tell you that specific exercises might not be the right solution for you at this point in time. Before you stop reading this article, let me explain.

According to studies done by Winters 2020 and Vlachopoulos et al. 2018 the most likely cause of shin splints seems to be too much load on the tissue.

Or in simple words: you’ve probably done too much, too soon after too little for too long. Maybe you started jogging again after a long break. Or you had a big increase in running volume lately. These are just two examples.

My follow-up question for you is: if the problem is caused by too much load, should we just add even more load to it by performing exercises?

Not really.

Should you Rather Rest Until the Pain is Gone?

Nope.

Initially, you should reduce the pain through methods like ice treatment, massage, or reducing load. Then, gradually increase the load while accepting some pain. What do I mean by that?

I mean that with certain conditions, such as shin splints, it seems reasonable to train with a little pain rather than reducing the load so much that there is no pain at all.

This is supported by the current literature, such as the studies by Smith et al. (2017) or Hickey et al. (2020).

In this regard it’s advisable to follow the 24-hour rule, where pain during and 24 hours after exercise should ideally be between 0 and 2 out of 10.

I would highly recommend that you stay in training, or get back to the gym as soon as possible, because you can still work on many other things BESIDES the anterior shin muscles.

This way you can stay active, fit and minimize the time you need to regain your full performance later on.

I had my athletes perform exercises like:

1. Hip Thrusts
2. Leg Extensions
3. Hamstring Curls
4. Romanian Deadlifts
5. Copenhagen Planks

2-3x per week, 3 sets each and have them work close to muscular failure.

Once the symptoms calmed down a bit, I started implementing exercises for foot and calves again. At the beginning, I chose standing calf raises.

After they tolerated those well, we got into some faster movement. I chose the following progression:

1. Ankle hops on both legs
2. Alternating ankle hops
3. Ankle Hops on one leg
4. Countermovement Jumps
5. Drop Jumps

As soon as the athletes tolerated those exercises, we got them running again.

We started slowly with 30/30 Intervals (which means 10 Rounds of 30 seconds of jogging immediately followed by 30 seconds of walking).

After that, we slowly started increasing the time of the running sessions until we hit the 30-Minute mark. That’s when we increased the intervals to 40/20, 50/10 and then jogging only, while keeping the time at 30 Minutes.

I understand that it might be difficult for you to judge, when and how much you should increase your training load. I wrote a free e-book called Pain Guide on how to do exactly that.

I will go into more detail in the Pain Guide, but I still want to give you some recommendations in this article.

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How do you manage your progress?

As I said before: many people do too much too soon, which we definitely want to avoid.

When it comes to increasing the training load, it’s often suggested not to increase it by more than 10 % per week (Piggott et al. 2009).

However, newer studies suggest that you can increase the training load by up to 25 % per week without risking setbacks (Damsted et al. 2018).

In concrete terms, this means if you ran 10 kilometers in the first week, you can safely increase the distance to between 11 and 12.5 kilometers in the second week. However, you shouldn’t go beyond 12.5 kilometers.

Expectations

It’s very important that we talk about expectations as well, though. If you expect to be 100% fit in three weeks, the therapy will likely be disappointing, and the results poor.

We need to understand how long it typically takes to become fully functional again. The following timelines are described in the scientific literature (Winters 2020):

• It usually takes about three months to be able to jog again at moderate intensity.
• For people who have had shin pain for around three months, it typically takes 9 to 12 months to become fully functional again.

However, this also depends on the severity of your pain, so it could be much faster.

Getting Rid of Shin Pain Through Surgery?

Before we wrap up this article, I want to briefly touch on a very important topic – surgery.

Studies like the one done by Winters 2020 clearly state, that surgery is not recommended.

By the way – have you ever wondered whether you should be worried about that cracking, crunching or snapping noise in your knee? Check out this article now to get some answers.

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