Hawkes Physiotherapy Blog

This next article will detail the vascular and neural type of shin splints. Basically this type relates to compression or damage of the blood vessels or nerves that pass through the lower leg area causing pain in the shin area. The most common type is Compartment syndrome: The lower leg has four compartments, which are separated by inelastic fascial layers, essentially causing confined and compressed space. In these compartments are the muscles, blood vessels and nerves. Below shows what structures are in each compartment: Anterior: Muscles: Extensor hallucis longus, Extensor digitorum, Tibialis anterior and Peroneus tertius Nerves: Deep peroneal nerve Blood vessels: Anterior tibial artery Lateral: Muscles: Peroneus brevis and longus Nerves: Superficial peroneal nerve and proximal portion of deep peroneal nerve Blood Vessels: Peroneal artery Superficial posterior: Muscles: Gastrocnemius, Soleus, Plantaris Nerves: Tibial nerve branch...

This next article will detail the muscle and tendon type of shin splints. If you remember back in the previous article, muscle and tendon often pulled onto the bone causing the bone related shin splints to occur. If the bone is getting overloaded from the pull of the muscle and tendon then there is also a lot of load going through the muscle and tendon too! So essentially, overload of muscle and tendon are the causes of this type of shin splints. Generally the overload of the muscle causes different levels of muscle injury and the overload of the tendon causes tendinopathy, which includes Tendinitis and Tendinosis. What are the types of muscle injury? The following are described by Mueller-Wohlfahrt (2012) and they progress in severity depending on the amount of overload to the muscle. Type 1A: Fatigue-induced muscle disorder:          This is characterised by an increased muscle tone caused by overexertion. Sympt...