No wonder these solutions aren’t terribly effective. You can keep trying to mitigate the consequences of the knee pain this movement pattern causes by putting a support under your arch to try to prevent the knee from rotating inwards and doing things to your IT band to loosen it up, but the former rarely works and the latter means you’re actually fighting what your body is trying to do to solve the problem of your weight being in the wrong place. And after that comes pain.Īt the same time, your nervous system tries to fix the problem further by rotating your knee inward, underneath your center of gravity, since you haven’t brought your center of gravity to where your leg should be. Before long you experience it, and the connective tissue leading from it that creates the necessary leverage, as very tight. It contracts powerfully, excessively in fact, in every gait cycle. When you don’t quite get your weight over one of your legs in midstance - let’s say your right - your gluteus medius needs to work quite hard to keep you from falling sideways to your left. In most cases with running injuries it’s difficult to tell whether the movement pattern or the pain came first, but in this case it’s definitely the movement pattern causing the pain and not the other way around. The answer is that it’s tight because it’s trying to do its job under difficult circumstances.Įvery runner I’ve ever seen with ITBS fails to shift their weight far enough onto the sore leg. To really put your problem in the past you need to ask this critical question: So you keep doing it in the hope it will finally be freed up enough that your problem will go away, and often it doesn’t, or not fully.

The tension in the band is eased and your knee feels better. Yet afterwards you feel a bit better, at least for a while. Stretching it or applying pressure can be agony. In ITB syndrome, the IT band, a tough band of connective tissue running down the outsides of your legs from hip to knee, gets very tight and tender to the touch. Often these are the things that seem to help a bit, without getting you all the way better and taking a lot of time and, in the case of orthotics, money. Let’s look at what foam rolling, stretching, and orthotics accomplish. I’ve also written about core stability extensively you can catch up by starting here. I’ve written about the problems with ice and anti-inflammatories elsewhere, so if you haven’t read those posts definitely go take a look at them. Runners might use ice and/or anti-inflammatories as well, and sometimes rest in the hope that will allow it to “heal.” The classic treatments for IT band syndrome in runners are stretching and foam rolling the IT band itself, core stability exercise, and/or orthotics. It’s can feel like Charlie Brown hoping this time Lucy will finally let him kick the football. Since the knee pain often doesn’t kick in till you’ve run a few miles, you go out the door with hope in your heart day after day, only to have your it dashed at mile 5 or 7 or whatever your threshold is. Yoko Pwno retain the party atmosphere to close the collection, adding a punchier, more processed percussion and popping bass to the highly melodic and harmonic elements of the original.The misery of an IT band problem can dog a runner for a long time. Movers International opt for a highly percussive and organically evolving approach, which marries synthetic sounds with effect treated samples from the original. Maranta offer a synth laced, soulfully performed dance stomper, whilst EARfATHER’s produces a truly epic and hypnotic Jon Hopkin’s-esque slow build of an electronic banger. The music video echoes this sentiment, with the gradual build of music exposing a larger throng of dancing revellers, boogieing to The Micro Band’s rhythm. The track, written over lockdown, is a forward-looking celebration of a time when live music, whether club, concert hall or festival field, is a part of our lives once more. The original track utilises all the signature elements of the band layered percussion and vocals, Alex Auldsmith’s idiosyncratic lyricism and vocal presence, Dan Crichton’s beautiful textural guitar and melody that lodges itself right between the ears to make you smile between them too.

Kick it band