Hello, I'm Dr. Robert Fenell with handandfootpain.com, and today I'm going to show you how to tape shin splints. Shin splints is a condition where you have pain on your lower leg either on the outside of the lower leg bone in this musculature or on the inside of the lower leg on the musculature. Due to repetitive stress to the feet, ankles and legs, excessive running, running uphill, downhill, poor footwear, obesity, there's a myriad of different conditions and activities that can cause somebody to develop shin splints but due to those stresses, it will cause irritation to the musculature and the tendons in the lower leg and elicit pain right there in the front of the shin. To begin taping for shin splints, you're going to want to have two things, a roll of athletic tape one and a half inches wide and if you'd like a pair of scissors. Usually we just tear the tape but sometimes we want to avoid wrinkling the tape so scissors can be a helpful tool to use. We're going to start by applying two base pieces of tape around the foot. The second piece of tape we're going to go about four inches up from the heel, from the ankle and tape around the calf. Now what we're going to do is we're going to come under from the outside of the foot. We're going to have the patient angle their foot inward in inversion like that and hold that and we're going to stretch this up really snug, really tight trying to avoid any wrinkling and lay this right down on this base strip on the ankle. What this does by lifting that arch of the foot up, that inner arch, it's going to relieve tension off the tibialis posterior and the tibialis anterior muscle which is really important to decompress these muscles that are irritated and inflamed. Now we can put a second piece of tape holding that long piece in place. This is the first half of the taping process for shin splints. The second part of the process is we're going to do something to really help alleviate directly this pain on the shin. Now if your pain is on the inside of the leg, we're going to tape you differently then if your pain is on the outside of the leg. If your pain is on the outside of the musculature, we're going to start on the bump on the outside of your ankle. That's called the lateral malleolus. We're going to tape around that ankle, back behind the Achilles with very little pressure and we're not going to pull until we get up to this finishing part and we come up right where the pain is. You want to position this right over the pain point on the lower leg. We're going to pull with a lot of tension right there and lay the tape down. We'll tear that and we'll do two to three more strips in that same position, overlapping about 50 percent. So we're going to come right on top of the first piece of tape around the ankle, over the Achilles, not too much pressure and right up on to the tibialis anterior area and here we're going to put more pressure to really stretch. We want to pull that musculature to get it so it comes closer to your lower leg bone, your tibia bone. Now if your pain was on the inside of the shin, we would do just the opposite. We would start on the inside of the ankle at the bump, just above the ankle joint, come across behind the Achilles and up at an angle and pulling with a lot of tension right here again to pull this musculature closer to the tibia bone. And a second strip would be 50 percent overlap behind the Achilles with very little to no pressure and we start our pressure right now on this musculature. This is Dr. Robert Fenell with handandfootpain.com. Thank you for watching this video.
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