6 Steps to Treating IT Band Syndrome

Happy Friday, folks!

Well, race photos are in and they are fabulous…
I posted the classiest one on instagram this week. So proud.

When you are pacing a friend for a marathon and – in a flash of fiscal awareness – you stuff a wad of free sports gels down your shirt for safe keeping, chances are, you will have some interesting race photos. And they go downhill from here. #keepingitclassy ?

A photo posted by Jessica Kuepfer (@lacesandlattes) on Oct 21, 2015 at 1:24pm PDT

Although I don’t have a formal training plan in place, I am slowly getting back into some workouts to stay healthy and maintain my baseline fitness. Now is the time of year where I return my focus to strength building and adjusting any muscle imbalances and healing up any chronic injuries.

One of my chronic weak spots in my IT bands. Always have been, always will be. As a female, hips are always going to ensure I am more likely to suffer from this so I am focusing on healing and preventing anything further.
They are flaring up now because after my accident, I stopped training and punctuated that only with extreme distances and my body is just letting me know that it is noticing it and not loving it.

So what am I doing to work on my IT bands and get back into tip top training shape?

1. Acupuncture – This is one treatment that works wonders for me. I go about twice a week and I lie with needles in my legs for about 20 minutes. I have gone in the day after a race in a lot of pain and left feeling nothing. I swear by acupunture.
2. Rolling and using the stick – I find foam rolling only works so much for me with my IT bands so I keep The Stick with me and give my legs a quick roll every day. It isn’t much, but it keeps me accountable to ongoing therapy.
3. Lacrosse ball – Get ready for pain sweats. Take a lacrosse ball and find the attachment point of your it band in your glutes. TRUST ME, you will know when you have found it. Hold it there and work that pain out. By releasing it at the attachment point, you will be able to speed up the healing.

4. Draw crosses – My physio told me to find the painful area where the IT band attaches in your knee and draw little crosses on the attachment point to facilitate blood flow and help to release. This works perfectly for those multitaskers among us and you better believe I was doing this at a recent conference in my heels.
5. Plank Hip dips – Lets address the actual problem, shall we? Doing plank hip dips will be hugely helpful to strengthan the areas around the hips and serve to keep those IT bands healthy. And give you abs of steel, so we all win.

6. This stretch. Janae is one of my favourite resources for ongoing run training.

Anything I am missing?
Whats on tap for this weekend?