🥇 The Athlete Development Journal

Simple solutions for complex athletic problems.

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Train your mind.

Fountains vs Drains

Some people are life-giving. Being around them just fills your cup. When you spend time with them, you feel more alive and energized. These people are fountains.

Others, however, are life-taking. Being around them empties your cup. When you spend time with them, you feel depleted and exhausted. These people are drains.

If you took 10 seconds, I’m sure you could think of a few people who fit squarely into each category.

You’ve got that one fountain friend who is always laughing, doesn’t stress you out, and is just enthusiastic about life. Then, you’ve got that other friend who is constantly complaining about something, walks around like someone just peed in their cheerios, and always talks about how unfair life is. That friend is a drain.

It’s so easy to put people into these categories, right?

… But what about you?

Are you energy-giving or energy-taking? Are you an optimist or a pessimist? Are you a victor or a victim? Are you a fountain or a drain?

Seriously, take some time to think about this. Drains are almost completely unaware of their drain-like tendencies. Maybe you mistake your pessimism for “being realistic.” Or maybe you think your victim-mentality is a display of humility.

You need to do a deep audit to discover where you sit on the drain-fountain spectrum.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: no one wants to be around a drain. Nor should they.

The more fountains you can expose yourself to and drains you can avoid, the more full of life you’ll be.

Surround yourself with fountains and become a fountain.

Build your body.

Shin Splint Plague

In a few weeks, we’re going to be in full swing of spring sport season, which might more aptly be named “shin splint season.”

Track, club volleyball, AAU basketball… shin splints are such a spring sport pandemic that I like to send out an article each year to help you fight the plague.

Today, we’ll start by going over what the anatomical issue actually is, then we’ll move to general strategies to reduce the odds that you get shin splints. For you track athletes, I’m going to give super specific strategies, because you all are the worst shin splint culprits.

What’s going on in there?

Shin splints are that annoying pain on the inside of the shin that gets worse with running and jumping, really sucks the day after running and jumping, then feels better with rest.

The fancy research folk refer to this as “medial tibial stress syndrome.”

In medicine, giving something the title of “syndrome” essentially means “we don’t really know what’s going on here.”

Isn’t that wild? Shin splints are about as common as seeing a teenage girl with a Starbucks drink, yet we still don’t know exactly what’s going on in there.

There are two prevailing theories.

1) Bone damage

One theory is that there is microdamage to the bone itself.

When you sprint and jump, your calf muscles contract violently. Those calf muscles produce a moment that bends the shinbone (tibia) backwards.

It doesn’t actually bend it. The muscle contraction provides stress in that direction. It’s like if you tried to break a really thick tree branch. You probably won’t be able to bend the branch, but you might put some cracks in the bark.

Similarly, those violent muscle contractions provide a bending stress that could cause microdamage to the bone surface.

2) Fascial/tendon damage

Another theory is that the bone itself is not the issue, but instead the place where the muscle inserts into the bone is the problem.

Overusing the calf (and other lower leg) muscles can lead to the tendon and facial connections to get damaged and irritated.

In reality, both issues are probably in play to some degree.

“Okay, but what can we do about it?”

Regardless of the anatomical problem, the root cause is the same. You have a mismatch between the amount of work your shins are doing and the amount of work your shins are capable of handling.

We call these load management issues. Load management issues lead to overuse injuries.

With an ankle sprain, you might just take one weird step and then you’re hurt. Shin splints aren’t like that. This injury builds up overtime.

As a load management issue, shin splints have two sides of the equation that we can manipulate in our favor:

1. the amount of work the shins do
2. how much work the shins are capable of handling.

1) The amount of work the shins do.

Our bodies are the most adaptive machines on earth. The amount of stress they can handle is truly awe-inspiring.

But, you must gradually build up to handle that stress.

If you slowly build up your workload, your body will have time to adapt and make the changes needed to handle more load. If you go too fast, however, your body won’t be able to handle it and you’ll end up injured.

We can actually measure this using an acute to chronic workload ratio (ACWR).

The ACWR is calculated by dividing the acute load (the work done in the current week) by the chronic load (the average work done over the past 4 weeks or so).

If you have an ACWR over 1.5, you are 2 to 4x more likely to get injured. The injury risk is lowest when you stay in the “sweet spot” of 0.8-1.3.

To make this more tangible, let’s imagine a track athlete who has averaged 3,000 meters of sprinting per week over the last 4 weeks. Then, their coach has a bad week at work and decides to take it out on the sprinters. So, they end up with 9,000 meters of sprinting that week.

9,000 m (Acute load) ÷ 3,000 m (Chronic load) = 3.0 ACWR

An ACWR of 3.0 is way above the safe range, so their shins are in trouble.

Outside of global workload, we can manipulate the amount of stress that the shin itself undergoes:

• Jumping and running on soft surfaces is easier on the shins. Get off of the hardwood and start jumping on some cushiony turf.
• Cushioned insoles can help mimic a soft surface and take some stress off your shins.
• See if there’s something about your running or jumping mechanics that we can alter to take some stress off your shins.

2) How much work the shins are capable of handling.

To manipulate the other side of the equation, we can increase the capacity of work that your shins can handle.

Muscles can act as buffers and protect the surrounding bones/joints. Aiming to get all of your lower leg muscles (gastrocnemius, soleus, tibialis posterior, tibialis anterior, intrinsic foot muscles, etc.) stronger can increase the workload that they can handle.

If you don’t have enough ankle dorsiflexion range of motion, then you’re not going to be able to absorb force smoothly. Adding more ankle dorsiflexion can help increase the amount of work that your shins can handle.

The most important factor to increase capacity, though, is gradual exposure. As we push the threshold of how much stress your shins can handle, but don’t cross it, your body will adapt and increase it’s capacity to handle that load.

Specific track actions

For our worst shin splint culprits, I wanted to leave you with no excuse to not start taking action today.

Let’s say you’re first week of track practice will look like this:

• M: 400m warm-up lap, 5 x 60m, 2 x 200m
• Tu: 400m warm-up lap, 4 x 400 m @ 70%
• W: 400m warm-up lap, 8 x 20m
• Th: 400m warm-up lap, 5 x 60m, 4 x 200m
• F: 400m warm-up lap, 4 x 400 m @ 70%

That’s a total of 7,160 meters in the first week of practice, with a mix of low intensity to high intensity impacts.

If I had 4 weeks to prep for that, I’d do something like this:

The Takeaways

1. Shin splints are a plague in the spring sports season, but we aren’t 100% sure of their anatomical cause.
2. To avoid the plague, you want to manipulate the amount of work the shins do by progressing your acute and chronic workloads intelligently, while simultaneously increasing how much work the shins are capable of handling by improving your lower limb strength and range of motion.

Fuel your soul.

We need more “we.”

I’m conflicted.

I’ve ​written​ before about the struggle of we vs me in high school and youth sports. We Americans live in an individualistic culture, but collectivism is always propped up as the correct mindset within a team sport. There is no “I” in “team,” ya know?

In that article, I came to the conclusion that sometimes you have to be team-first and sometimes you have to be me-first. I still think that’s true, but now I’m concerned about how much our sports culture is over-indexing on “me-first.”

High school and youth athletes play on their main sport’s school team, a travel team or two, and maybe one or two other teams for other sports. The bulk of recruiting has moved to the travel teams for just about every sport, so the traditional model where high school sports reigned supreme is dying (or more accurately, has been dead).

With the barrier to changing travel teams being so low, athletes are constantly moving from one team to the next to find the right fit for them. And who can blame them?

But, I think with us being deprived of one of our main sources of collectivism, we lose out on nourishment for our soul.

Arthur Brooks is a leading researcher on the science of happiness and he often talks about the imperative value of transcendence. He defines transcendence as the practice of making yourself small and the universe large.

Focusing on your own career, appearance, and social status makes your world tiny and fragile.

Transcendence is the antidote to this fragility. It allows you to view your life as a small part of a vast, beautiful, and meaningful whole.

It feels oxymoronic, doesn’t it? Regularly being reminded that how small you really are in this great, big world is one of the best ways to find meaning and improve your happiness.

I think being team-first in sports has been a rock of experiencing transcendence as an American youth and it saddens me to watch that erode away.

Let’s wrap it up with a couple important things…

1. This newsletter and podcast are completely free. I spend many hours each week researching, writing, illustrating, recording, editing, and uploading. The best way you can support it and allow it to continue is to share it with people you know. You can just send them to ​gtperformance.co/newsletter​ and they can subscribe there!
2. Everything in these newsletters, podcasts, social media, and on our website is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as medical advice for you or your athlete. Consult directly with a healthcare professional.

Thanks so much for your help in spreading the word about athlete development!

Go be great out there,

Zach

Dr. Zach Guiser, PT, DPT, CSCS