IT Band Tightness

Ever since doing mostly kicking (hard) at swim practice (while my shoulder heals), I’ve had awfully tight IT bands and hip and knee pain. I never knew swimming could be so hard on the body. The tight IT bands are adversely affecting my running.

I’ve been doing these stretches (have been doing them for a year, ever since first having hip pain from running). These are great stretches, and have somewhat helped my current problem…
http://www.nismat.org/ptcor/itb_stretch/

But they have not completely gotten rid of it. I found this great site that shows stretches that I hadn’t seen before:

http://www.lwcoaching.com/library/runnersguideitbs.htm

I did these just one time and feel better already!

UPDATE 5/16/06:
I stopped doing these, not sure if they were the right thing, and cut back my running mileage and ran thru the pain while preparing for a Sprint distance race. Then ended up with knee pain below my kneecap (that’s the bad kind of knee pain). So, I went to a physical therapist who knows triathletes. He said that even tho the IT band problem showed up when I did those swim kick workouts , there was probably some issues going on before that. The kicking was just the straw that broke the camels back, that’s why the IT Band problems didn’t go away when I stopped the hard swim kicking. He said my glutues medius on the right side was week, and that was making my hip and hamstring do extra work to compensate, and leading to increasing pain. He gave me some stuff to do to increase the strenght and flexibility of that area. If only I had kept up wtih the stuff here, I might have avoided this. The trouble is, when you self treat injuries, you really don’t know if it’s the right thing. Bottom line is find a good PT who knows triathletes.