General Fitness & Nutrition: Stress Fracture treatment?

Basically, if an activity causes you any pain, don't do it. The only way for your injury to heal is to rest it. There is also a hierarchy of activities that you need to ascend up when recovering. Starting from the bottom it is: 1) Walking. If you can't walk w/o any pain, you should get some crutches. Now you will feel silly w/ crutches if you can walk, but it helps. In my first 3-4 days on crutches, I saw a greater improvement in my condition than I had in the previous 3-4 weeks when I tried to walk and bike through recovery. After about 4 days, I was able to jettison the crutches. 2) Non-weight bearing exercises like swimming and then biking. 3) Weight bearing, low-impact exercises like stairs and elliptical. 4) Finally, running. Depending on how severe your injury is, you might be able to start at step 2 or 3. But if you feel any pain while doing an activity or the day after, stop. And the sneaky thing about stress fractures (and one way to diagnose them) is that they will feel better during an activity, which is deceptive b/c it makes you think you aren't doing any damage. So even if after 5 minutes of running you feel "better" than you did when you started, you shouldn't be running.

The best advice I can give you is that if you are really worried about this and have health insurance, you should go see a sports medicine doctor. S/he will be able to examine you clinically and might suggest an x-ray or MRI. S/he will also be able to give you a recovery regiment suited to your specific injury. If you can't go, then choose another form of cardio like biking or swimming to stay in shape until you can run w/o pain. As for myself, I injured myself back in the middle of February and hope to begin running again in about a week or two. But my injury was clearly more serious than yours, partially because I tried to train through it. After a six mile run one day I had a sore leg. However, I just thought it was a tired muscle, so after one day of cross-training I went for a 9 mile run. My leg hurt a bit the first mile or two, but then I felt fine... until the next morning when I could hardly walk. Then for the next 6 or 7 weeks I stopped running but would use an exercise bike despite the pain and walk a mile or two a day across campus. I don't think the bike and the walking made my injury any worse, but they certainly didn't help. Then I saw a good doctor (being an ND student I was able to see the sports medicine guy for the ND x-country and track teams), and he put me on crutches for almost a week (until I could walk w/o pain). That was the beginning of April and since then my recovery has been pretty quick. W/in about 4 weeks from when I first went on crutches I was able to start biking again. Your recovery will surely be shorter than mine, but the lesson to take from all of this is that with a stress fracture, you can only make it worse by trying to train through it.