Anterior Compartment Syndrome

This is a condition in which the fascia that surround the muscles on the anterior part of the leg appear to be tight, so that during exercise when the muscle tries to expand, it can’t. This can become painful and gets known as anterior compartment syndrome or chronic exertional compartment syndrome. Typical the only satisfactory treatment for this has been a surgical release of the fascia as conservative treatments never seemed to work very well. This topic has been generating a lot of interest lately due to the using of changing the running gait appearing to be very successful at managing this. The trend has been to use forefoot striking rather than heel striking and shortening the stride length and increasing the cadence. A non-controlled study show that this is to be very effective and a lot of good clinical experience is supporting it use.