Shin Splints: Can You Avoid Them When Playing Footy, Soccer or League?
Shin Splints Canberra
Let’s be real — shin splints are the party crashers of the sports world. They sneak in when you’re finally getting fit, remind you that your legs exist, and then refuse to leave.
At The Body Lab, we see shin splints more often than pre-season injuries — especially in running-heavy sports like AFL, soccer, and rugby league. Here’s the lowdown on what’s really going on in your shins, why they’re complaining, and how to keep them happy (or at least less angry).
So, What Exactly Are Shin Splints?
“Shin splints” isn’t one single injury — it’s more like an umbrella term covering a few different types of lower-leg stress. The most common of these is medial tibial stress syndrome (MTSS) — the dull, nagging pain that runs along the inner edge of your shinbone when you run, kick, or train hard.
It’s basically your muscles, tendons, and bone tissue waving a white flag after too much repetitive impact. Left unchecked, that irritation can turn into inflammation, micro-tears, or even a stress fracture.
How Do Shin Splints Feel?
A dull or sharp ache along the inside of the shinbone
Tenderness to the touch (yep, even poking it hurts)
Mild swelling
Pain that starts when you move, settles a bit mid-game, and then flares up later
In more serious cases, pain even at rest — the “you’ve pushed it too far” level
Why They Happen (a.k.a. The Perfect Storm)
Most shin splints come down to overload — too much, too soon. But a few common culprits love to join the party:
Rapid increases in training load (especially pre-season heroes)
Hard or uneven playing surfaces
Tight calves or weak glutes
Old, unsupportive boots
Flat feet or high arches causing poor shock absorption
Over-striding or poor gait mechanics
Biomechanical quirks that make your shins do more than their fair share
The Three Big Shin Pain Culprits
1. Medial Tibial Stress Syndrome (MTSS)
This is the most common version — that tender, inflamed inside-shin pain. It usually shows up when your lower-leg muscles and the lining of your tibia are working overtime, often thanks to flat feet, calf tightness, or poor foot mechanics.
Fun fact: overly cushioned running shoes may actually increase your risk — by letting you heel-strike harder and load your shins more with every step. (Yes, irony lives in the footwear aisle.)
2. Exertional Compartment Syndrome
Your lower leg is divided into four “compartments” of muscles and tissues. When one of them — usually the front (anterior) one — swells from overuse, it can’t expand. Cue pressure, pain, tightness, and swelling mid-game.
It often eases with rest but returns as soon as you run again.
Don’t confuse this with acute compartment syndrome, which is an emergency — that one comes with numbness, pale skin, severe pain, and needs immediate medical attention.
3. Stress Fractures
This is the shin splint’s older, crankier cousin. Tiny cracks develop in your tibia from repetitive impact — especially if you keep pushing through pain. The ache localises to one spot and gets worse with activity.
Catch it early, and it’ll heal. Ignore it, and you could be benched for months.
Can You Actually Avoid Shin Splints?
Short answer: not 100% — because sport is chaos.
Long answer: you can dramatically reduce your risk with smart training, solid footwear, and attention to your movement mechanics.
Here’s how:
Training & Conditioning
Progress slowly – increase training load by no more than 10% per week.
Warm up properly – dynamic stretches before, static stretches after.
Mix it up – cross-train with swimming or cycling to reduce leg impact.
Strength matters – build calf, glute, and core strength for better shock absorption.
Footwear & Mechanics
Check your boots – worn-out studs or thin soles = shin stress.
Know your foot type – flat feet or high arches need specific support.
Gait analysis – a professional gait and movement assessment (like we do at The Body Lab) can uncover inefficient patterns before they cause pain.
Train smarter – wherever possible, stick to grass or softer turf to reduce impact.
Recovery & Early Intervention
Listen to your legs – dull ache = rest, not heroics.
R.I.C.E. – Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation for flare-ups.
Don’t ignore it – persistent pain longer than two weeks? Get assessed to rule out stress fractures or compartment syndrome.
What We Do at The Body Lab
When players come in with shin pain, we don’t just slap on ice and send them home. We assess everything — foot posture, ankle range, calf flexibility, glute strength, and gait mechanics (with full video gait analysis).
Then we build a plan that might include:
Targeted strengthening and mobility drills
Manual therapy and joint mobilisation
Gait retraining to optimise mechanics
Foot orthotics, wedges, or footwear tweaks
Dry needling, laser therapy, or InterX electrical stimulation for pain and recovery
We treat the cause, not the symptom — and if we spot something beyond our scope, we refer you to the right specialists to keep your rehab on track.
Bottom Line
Shin splints may be common, but they’re not a life sentence. With the right training load, movement analysis, and treatment plan, you can keep your legs strong, pain-free, and ready to run rings around the competition.
So before you tape your shins and hope for the best — book your Gait & Movement Assessment at The Body Lab Canberra.
Let’s find out why your shins hurt and get you back to playing harder, faster, and pain-free.
Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) is often misunderstood as simply being “double-jointed” or unusually flexible. In reality, EDS is a complex connective tissue disorder that affects joint stability, proprioception, pain processing, fatigue, autonomic function, and movement control throughout the entire body.
For therapists, this creates a unique clinical challenge. Many traditional rehabilitation approaches that work well for the general population—including aggressive stretching, heavy manual therapy, or isolated strengthening—can sometimes worsen symptoms in people with EDS. What appears to be weakness may actually be instability. What appears to be tightness may be a protective strategy. And what appears to be a local joint problem may reflect a much larger whole-body compensation pattern. Understanding EDS requires a shift away from simply chasing pain or increasing mobility and towards improving control, body awareness, load management, nervous system regulation, and long-term resilience.
In this article, we explore the current evidence surrounding EDS, including proprioception, pain, strength training, autonomic dysfunction, fascia, breathing mechanics, and the role of whole-body assessment. We also examine where emerging concepts such as biotensegrity and fascial therapy may fit within modern clinical practice and discuss the key principles every therapist should understand when working with hypermobile patients.
Most people think cavities are caused by sugar alone. But the way you breathe may be playing a bigger role than you realise. Nasal breathing supports saliva production, healthy sinus development and proper facial growth, while chronic mouth breathing has been linked to dental crowding, dry mouth and an increased risk of tooth decay. Discover why your nose may be one of the most important tools for protecting your teeth and shaping your face.
Most people assume breathing exercises and breathing retraining are the same thing.
They’re not.
In fact, this misunderstanding may be one of the biggest reasons people continue to struggle with poor sleep, jaw tension, anxiety, headaches, fatigue, and breathing-related problems despite regularly practising breathing techniques.
Think about it.
The average person takes around 20,000 breaths every day.
A five-minute breathing exercise might influence a few dozen of them.
What about the other 19,900?
This is where breathing retraining becomes different. Rather than focusing on a specific exercise, breathing retraining aims to change your everyday breathing patterns—while you’re working, walking, talking, sleeping, exercising, and dealing with stress.
In this article, we’ll explore why breathing exercises alone often fail to create lasting change, the difference between breathwork and breathing retraining, and how improving your default breathing habits may have a greater impact on your health than any breathing technique.
Most of us never think about breathing until something goes wrong.
A blocked nose. Poor sleep. Anxiety. Headaches. Jaw tension. Fatigue.
The common assumption is that we need more oxygen. But what if the problem isn’t a lack of oxygen at all?
Modern research suggests that many people breathe far more than their bodies actually require. In doing so, they may be disrupting the delicate balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide that helps regulate blood flow, nervous system function, sleep quality and even oxygen delivery to the tissues.
In this article, we’ll explore why bigger breaths aren’t always better, why carbon dioxide may be one of the most misunderstood gases in human physiology, and how your breathing habits could be influencing everything from jaw tension and posture to energy levels and recovery.
When most people develop jaw pain, clicking, clenching, or teeth grinding, attention immediately turns to the jaw joint itself.
Makes sense.
After all, that’s where the symptoms are.
But what if the jaw isn’t actually the starting point?
What if it’s simply the place where a much larger story is being expressed?
Emerging research suggests that many cases of TMJ dysfunction may involve far more than joint mechanics alone. Breathing patterns, sleep quality, nervous system regulation, tongue posture, neck tension, stress, and even the way the brain processes sensory information may all play important roles.
In other words, your jaw might not be malfunctioning because it is broken.
It might be working overtime because other systems are struggling.
In this article, we’ll explore the fascinating relationship between the jaw, neck, airway and nervous system—and why treating the jaw alone may not always provide lasting relief.
Most people think stress lives in the mind. Others think it lives in the shoulders. But what if one of the body’s favourite places to store stress is your jaw?
Emerging research suggests the jaw is connected to emotional processing, pain perception, breathing, posture and even activity within the brain’s limbic system. Learn how jaw tension, chronic stress and inflammation may be influencing headaches, neck pain, fatigue and persistent pain—and why treating the whole person matters more than chasing symptoms.
At a kids’ sporting match over the weekend, I watched a gentleman walking in thongs and immediately noticed something I see constantly in clinic: his body barely changed shape from heel strike through to mid-stance. His ankle stayed stiff, his knee barely adapted, and his pelvis remained locked in one position. Over time, this type of walking pattern can reduce force absorption, overload the lumbar spine, affect circulation, compress nerves, and contribute to chronic pain. Here’s why walking is really a force-management system — and what happens when the body loses its ability to adapt.
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Persistent pain is not always caused by tight muscles or stiff joints. In many cases the nervous system and skin play a key role. Understanding this connection can change how chronic pain is treated.
Dermo-Neuro Modulating is a gentle manual therapy technique that works through the skin to calm irritated nerves and reduce pain. Developed by physiotherapist Diane Jacobs, it offers a modern, neuroscience-informed approach to treating persistent pain conditions.
Ankle sprains are often treated as ligament injuries, but the mechanics of the foot tell a much bigger story. One structure that frequently goes unnoticed is the Flexor Hallucis Longus (FHL) — the tendon that connects the calf to the big toe and plays a critical role in propulsion, arch stability, and walking efficiency. Because this tendon runs through a narrow tunnel behind the ankle joint, it can be compressed or irritated during common inversion ankle sprains. Understanding how the FHL contributes to foot mechanics may help explain persistent ankle stiffness, reduced push-off power, and ongoing pain after injury. Exploring the role of the big toe in ankle recovery offers a more complete view of foot biomechanics and movement rehabilitation.
If you’ve ever searched “acupuncture for pain Canberra”, chances are something in your body has decided it’s had enough. Maybe it’s your heel barking every morning, a shoulder that refuses to behave, or a lower back that stiffens the moment you sit down too long.
Acupuncture can be remarkably effective for reducing pain. But here’s the honest truth most clinics won’t say out loud:
Foot shape plays an important role in how the foot absorbs force and distributes pressure during walking. From flatter pes planus feet to the higher-arched pes cavus foot type, these structural differences influence how load travels through the heel and arch.
Understanding how these loading patterns affect the tissues around the heel—including the plantar fascia and Baxter’s nerve—may help explain why some people develop persistent heel pain while others do not.
Most cases of heel pain are quickly labelled plantar fasciitis, but that diagnosis doesn’t always tell the full story.
Research suggests that Baxter’s nerve entrapment—compression of the inferior calcaneal nerve—may account for up to 20% of chronic heel pain cases. Because the symptoms overlap with plantar fasciitis, this nerve condition is frequently overlooked.
Understanding how gait mechanics and medial heel loading influence the tissues surrounding Baxter’s nerve can help explain why some heel pain persists despite traditional treatments.
Most cases of heel pain are quickly labelled plantar fasciitis, but that diagnosis doesn’t always tell the full story.In fact, research suggests that up to 20% of chronic heel pain cases may involve compression of Baxter’s nerve, a small branch of the lateral plantar nerve that runs along the inside of the heel. Because the symptoms overlap, Baxter’s nerve entrapment is frequently mistaken for plantar fasciitis.While plantar fasciitis involves irritation of the plantar fascia, Baxter’s neuropathy is a nerve compression problem, which means the symptoms, mechanics and treatment considerations can be quite different.
Understanding the difference is important. Treatments designed for plantar fascia inflammation may not help nerve-related heel pain—and in some cases may even aggravate the underlying problem.
In this article we explore the key anatomical and biomechanical differences between these two conditions and explain why a deeper look at foot mechanics and gait can be crucial when heel pain persists.
Heel pain when walking is one of the most common problems I see at The Body Lab in Canberra. Here’s why it happens and how improving foot mechanics can help.
Foot pain is often treated locally, but the real cause may lie in how your foot and ankle manage force during movement. Learn how foot mechanics, tendon loading and gait influence heel pain, plantar fasciitis, posture and movement efficiency.
Most people think stress is all adrenaline and action.
But there’s another version — the quiet one. The one where motivation fades, energy drops, and your nervous system stops fighting and starts conserving.
This isn’t weakness. It’s biology.
Research from Martin Seligman and earlier work by Curt Richter showed that when stress becomes uncontrollable, the brain shifts into a shutdown pattern known as learned helplessness.
At a chemical level, this state is linked to altered acetylcholine signaling, increased nitric oxide, reduced thyroid hormone activity, and impaired mitochondrial energy production. In simple terms? Your metabolism and your mood are having the same conversation.
The good news: the nervous system is plastic. Environment, light exposure, movement, social connection, and metabolic support all influence whether the brain adapts toward resilience — or surrender.
Helplessness isn’t a character flaw.
It’s a reversible physiological state.
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I think people are expecting to be fixed in one session and people don’t realise the amount of joints and muscle connections in the lower body and the work needed (strength) and connectiveness (joint sequencing) to actually have a foot or lower limb function in walking.
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Many people expect foot or knee pain to be “fixed” in one session.
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Riccardo Galeotti doesn’t treat pain by chasing symptoms — he looks at how your body actually moves. As the founder of The Body Lab Canberra, Riccardo combines biomechanics, gait analysis, movement therapy, and acupuncture to uncover the patterns driving recurring pain. By focusing on how you walk, load, and adapt to gravity, his work helps clients move better, feel stronger, and build long-term resilience — not just short-term relief.
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