How can I strengthen my shins and calves for running, and why are strong shins important?
- Friday Nov 20,2009 06:11 AM
- By diddy
- In Others
I know how important calves are, but what about shins?
how can i strengthen the two of them without the use of expensive equiptment?
It needs to be a fairly hard exercise because I have been doing 1 legged calf raises on each leg every night and It just takes too long for it to be hard now, i need a more challenging way.
also, how do you strengthen the knees?
Calves, Exercise, Knees, Running, Shins
4 Comments
I would say you can do stairs, lungees, and many other exercises. Stairs, such as running up and down on bleachers, is an effective way to strengthen your muscles, especially if you run on your tippy toes. Lungees, mostly help your thighs, but it also workouts your bottom portion of your leg as well. Chins are a very important part of a runner’s body, if someone doesn’t take care of it, it can lead to shin splints, which is both painful and you will need to take some time off to let it heal. (Shin splints is when the muscle begins detaching from the bone.) Knees, I don’t think there is a way to strengthen it, probably running does, because knees always bend when your running, and almost on all of your exercises. Good Luck!
Shins can be strengthed by sitting down with legs extended in front of you. Wrap a towel around feet and flex your feet. It works better with a 4 foot long elastic band. You should be able to find one at a sporting goods store. If you have shin splints these should help to relieve them.
Calf raises are important but aren’t the only muscle needed to run fast. You need to have a balance of strength in all leg muscles groups to run faster.
Try to strengthen both calves together so as you’re sure to increase the strength of each at the same rate.
The best way to ’strengthen’ knees is by strenghtening surrounding muscle groups (ie calves & quads) proportionally. Less stress on your knees (a joint) will be the result.
You can strengthen all of those areas and prep your legs for running with one simple, age old excercise.
Jumping jacks. If done in your home or a gym, do them barefoot. The feet need resistance training as well. Make them harder by holding a couple bottles of water in each hand.
The only reason I can think of that shins are important is that if they’re too weak, you get shin splints, which hurts a lot and prevents you from running. To prevent that, you can exercise them by walking on your heels with your feet in different orientations.
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