What If It's Not the ITB’s fault?

Hi, I'm Dr. Molly with Your Goals Physical Therapy. If you're a runner, then I bet that you’ve tried rolling your it-band. You probably have a big foam roller, or maybe it's a little foamer.  Anyway, you have a foam roller that you religiously try to stretch that IT-band because it gets tight. Then your hip or your knee bothers you, from running. You've been taught that stretching your it-band will help eliminate that pain. And to be fair, it probably does help at least temporarily to get rid of that pain. That pain can be a very intense nagging pain in your knee or hip. I'm always impressed with the people that can get those foam rollers that have the knobs on them, and really get in there with those foam rollers on the it-band. (click here if you want to see my favorite way to stretch my ITB on a foam roller)

If that's helping you by all means that is fabulous because sometimes just stretching does help. But if this is something that's been persisting and it's been months, and maybe you're stuck. You're not able to run as fast as you want, or you're not able to make it as long as you want, because this pain is persistent, it's not going away. Then I'm gonna suggest that it is actually more of a hip or an ankle strength or state stability problem. When your foot is hitting the ground, if it's not stable or your hips are not stable, it puts a lot of strain on your knee.

It turns out that it-band under your TFL(tensor fascia lata), which is the muscle that attaches to the IT-band, is attached to your hip bone. The TFL tends to be very sturdy muscles and can help with hip flexion and other stability things and they just take over.  And so what happens is instead of there being multiple muscles, trying to do the running for you, you end up getting one muscle that's overbearing and doing a lot more work until it just can't do it anymore. That's where you're getting this pain. The trick to stopping the pain is a robust stretching program so it's not just your it-band. You need to make sure you're getting your hamstrings, your quadriceps and your hip flexors (So the front of your thigh, the front of your hip and the back of your thigh) make sure that all of them are getting stretched, also your calves.

Then you want to make sure that you're strengthening your ankle and you're strengthening your hip. Which does mean that you're going to take one of your running days and make it a strength training day. And maybe one of your days is stretching day in your training program. I promise that will not deter you from being able to run faster or run longer. It will actually help you be able to achieve those goals. Sometimes as runners, we get dead set on just running, we just want to run, and there's no way you're going to take me off because we think “If I miss a day, I'm not going to be able to run as far as fast or as well as I was before.” And that's truly how it can feel internally. But, I can tell you from years of experience, that if you back off and you work on flexibility and strength, in addition to your running, you can blow past all the goals that you have. If this is the type of thing that you're trying to figure out, and you need a little bit of help by all means, send me a message, contact me.

I’d love to help you figure that out. Whether that's an at home training program or something that we would work together. I just like working through these problems with people, this is what I do. I help people get past these problems and hip pain and knee pain so that they can run faster and run longer without any problems. Well, I hope that this information helps. I know this was kind of short and sweet, to the point. If it-band rolling helps you feel free to keep going, but if that’s something that doesn't feel like it's actually doing you what you want it to do, give me a call.

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