Ache in lower legs/ankles when running on treadmill.

December 10, 2013 by No Comments

Best suggestion I can offer is experiment around with your stride – shorten it up or lengthen it, or try faster cadence or slower, and experiment with foot strike – and of course don’t do all of them in the same session – pick one and play with it. Where your pain starts very quickly, you can likely determine if the change has any relationship to the issue.

Any of these stride variations could be different than how you run in the real world. As a for example, winter has arrived in my part of the world so I’m doing more running on a treadmill, yet I spend the rest of the year running on trails and dirt roads. On the days I do get to run outside now, I have to consciously speed up my cadence which has the effect of shortening my stride, but if I don’t, one of my knees gets very grumpy right away. It serves as a quick reminder and now that I’ve figured out what the knee needs to be happy, it’s a quick fix – but it took some experimenting.