How to Treat Compartment Syndrome in Runners

Audio Transcript

Coach Jeff: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Runners Connect Extra Kick Daily Podcast. Back with you here on a Thursday. I hope you are having a fantastic week.

Today’s question is from Ron.

Ron: The last two times I’ve tried running outside on my usual running paths, my sheens and calves started the tighten up fast.

Most of the tightness is located around my sheens and I get to the point where in the middle runs, my sheens really start to bother me. In addition, I also get the foot slaps.

Looking on line, I found that my symptoms closely match that of chronic compartment syndrome. What do you think? Any advice is appreciated.

Jeff: Thank you so much Ron for your question. I will say that answering injury related questions on the daily podcast is difficult.

This is because a lot of times when it comes to diagnosing an injury, there needs to be a lot of back and forth to really assess what type of injury and what time of problem you have.

If you do believe that you have compartment syndrome, then unfortunately there is some bad news for you. With compartment syndrome, there really is not a cure outside of surgery.

The procedure is called a Fasciotomy which involves making little slits in the compartments of your lower leg to allow room for them to expand during exercise.

The success rate luckily is high and the research that we’ve done, it’s usually between a 60 and 80% success rate for the surgery.

Unless you have a troublesome for example, your posterior compartment syndrome which has about a fifty percent success rate although, the sample there is much smaller, since it’s rarer for runners to have that.

Make sure to set up an appointment with a physical therapist or a doctor so that way you can verify if you have compartment syndrome, as you’re going to need to go see a doctor to get that procedure done for yourself.

There are some more recent theories that if you potentially switch your foot strike, that you could actually reduce the stress on the compartment enough, and you can reduce the load enough, you will eliminate the pain that you’re having.

A lot of runners that have compartment syndrome are over striding and as a result, are heel striking.

Heel striking itself isn’t bad, but over striding is because that creates a lot more impact which is going to have to travel up and be absorbed by the muscles in the calf and sheens.

Whereas with fore foot striking, the foot is absorbing a lot more of the impacts and therefore taking some of that load away from the sheens.

Explaining how to switch to fore foot striking is a complicated topic to get into in addition to this answering this question.

However, we’ve done a lot of research and a lot of guides on our website. If you just Google Runners connect foot strike, we have a guide on how to switch to forefoot striking the correct way.

Let me caution you on this. Runners will a lot of times start trying to run on their toes or run on the front of their foot. That is not how you switch to a fore foot striking.

There are a lot of biomechanical elements that need to happen for you to change your foot strike safely and effectively. Make sure that you read that article and don’t just try to run on your fore feet.

There are also a couple potential risks of doing that.

First, switching to fore foot strike is not something that should happen very quickly or something that is starting to run on your toes.

There needs to be by mechanical changes that happen so that you turn to a natural fore foot striker and that it becomes part of the biomechanical chain.

You’re going to significantly increase your risk of a better tussle structure fractures calf injuries and Achilles injuries.

Take the time to consider how you can transition correctly to a fore foot strike or a strike that is producing less impact.

Another thing to keep in mind there is that you may already heel striking. It may not be the actual cause.

Another thing you want to potentially consider is whether that’s something that’s even going to help.

That’s where understanding more about the biomechanical chain and getting some type of video analysis can really help in that case.

Finally, it’s not going to cure all for cases of compartment syndrome especially for the aggressive types of compartments syndrome like posterior or deep compartment syndrome. Those are potentially going to be more aggravated by switching to a fore foot strike.

I recommend that you should see a therapist or a doctor or at least get a running or gait analysis to see what might be happening in your gait before you try to look at any potential fixes.

Surgery is a pretty effective method for treating compartment syndrome and after you are healthy, you can return to running quickly from that as well.

There’s a downside there that you’re obvious going to need some time off, but ideally something that eventually, you’ll be able to healthy and have many years of healthy running ahead of you.

I hope that answer helped answer your question Ron and I want to appreciate and thank everybody for listening to the daily podcast. It means so much to us.

If you have any friends that you think could benefit from listening that kind of thing or any questions that we answer, feel free to send them and we really appreciate if you subscribe.

We love being of the help as many runners as possible. Thanks again so much and I hope you have a fantastic run today.