Shin pain can be due to an overuse injury. You will feel pain at the front of the shin or towards the middle of the shin. The exact causes (from research) is still not clear (as for most conditions) but there has been some good quality research to show that muscles at the foot and that act on the foot are often involved. Therefore, if you have shin pain the podiatrist is a good person to see either as the primary person or as part of your health-care team looking after your shins.

Management can include rehabilitation, foot orthoses, running gait re-training. All of these are done to try and reduce stress to the shin and increase the amount of time you can spend on your feet either running, playing sport or walking.

Recent research on army recruits has also shown that the use of foot orthoses can prevent stress fractures/reactions to the bones in the shin. Given we can prevent shin pain from the foot it provides pretty good evidence that checking your feet as part of managing your shin pain is paramount.