Athletico Health Resources

Welcome to post-race letdown. It is completely normal and even inevitable to feel a big letdown after a milestone race. Being the type-A person most athletes are, you’ve trained and sacrificed for months preparing yourself and now just like that, it’s done. Hopefully race day went well and you achieved your goal, but even if you didn’t, the feelings are the same. You have been focusing on that event for months and now it’s over. It’s easy to let that bring you down, but you don’t have to let that happen. This post will give hints on how you can avoid post-race letdown. (more…)

The phone that you’re carrying around in your pocket has more computing power than was available to NASA when the first men were sent to the moon. It can help you keep up with work, take amazing photos at a moment’s notice, and even allow you to talk to someone face-to-face on the opposite side of the planet. While a lot of us are familiar with how phones and new apps can help increase productivity (or hinder it *cough* Angry Birds *cough*), a lot of people don’t realize that there are ways to use your phone to improve your health in 5 key areas. (more…)

Congratulations on completing your Marathon! Whether this is your first or 50^th marathon, you should be proud of your accomplishment and the hard work that brought you across the finish line. I hope you finished your race smiling. Just remember, recovering from the race is just as crucial as your training. Most experts agree that recovery begins the moment you cross the finish line. This blog post will cover what you can do in the minutes, hours, days and weeks following a big race that will help you prevent injury and replenish your body. (more…)

Elite athletes jumping into tubs filled with ice water after a tough workout is a fairly cliché scene in sports movies, but for good reason. Ice baths have become a post-workout habit that countless professional athletes take very seriously. Kobe Bryant is so dedicated to taking ice baths that his personal tub of cold water has gotten its own police escort! Hearing things like that makes people wonder how something as simple as ice water can be beneficial to the world’s most successful athletes. When asked, those athletes will often cite reduced muscle soreness, faster recovery, and injury prevention as their main reasons for taking the plunge. (more…)

When most people picture running, they think “Chariots of Fire.” They see long, forward strides (and maybe a pretty cool soundtrack). In reality, a long distance runner’s main thrust happens behind his or her body. (more…)

Running season has arrived and a lot of you wanted to hit the ground running, but instead, you hit the ground hurting…hurting on the outside of your knee. If that’s the case, you could have iliotibial band syndrome (ITBS) or IT band syndrome for short. IT band syndrome is an overuse injury that is common in endurance athletes like runners and bikers. It affects a tissue that runs from the side of your hip all of the way down past your knee. Most of the time, the inflammation manifests itself as pain on the outside of the knee. It can be incredibly painful and is typically a frustratingly stubborn injury to deal with.
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The term “shin splints” gets tossed around a lot among athletes. What exactly are shin splints, what causes them and how can you alleviate them if you already are affected by them?

Shin splints are not caused by one thing because they are actually a symptom of deeper issues and are not a medical condition. The term shin splint generally refers to achiness and/or acute pain in the front side of your tibia (shin bone) while your foot is dorsiflexed (your foot is flexed). Depending on the person, the pain may be during exercise, immediately following exercise or even all the time. This pain and/or discomfort can be caused by a variety of things. This post will cover the most common causes of shin splints and how you can resolve them. (more…)

Spring in Chicago came early this year, and with that many recreational runners took advantage of the weather and returned to running after several months of inactivity or running indoors. Also, many of these runners in their excitement did not progress slowly back into the activity and thus were more susceptible to injuries, including patellofemoral syndrome, which is often referred to as “runner’s knee.” (more…)