Running cramps and pains diagnostic flowchart
Copyright 2011 by Morris Rosenthal All Rights Reserved
Muscle and tendon problems, sprains and pains for runners
Is it muscle and tendon related? Running for many years will teach you a lot about your body, if nothing else. I divide the injuries that are occur or affect my running into two groups, the muscle and tendon injuries, and everything else. Sprains, which affect the ligaments that hold your bones together, fall into the everything else category. Muscle injuries can be caused by everything from overuse strains or deep bruises, to poor nutrition and vitamin deficiencies. It's funny how many times over the years I've gone limping through a run with pain and spasms in one muscle or another, only to remember that night how I banged the leg into a desk or got hit in the back of the calf by a log coming of a splitter the day before. Those muscle injuries that are easily walked off when they occur often come back in a painful way when running, and depending on the depth of the bruise, may even get worse for a while if I keep running. Most of my tendon injuries, on the other hand, develop slowly while running, and the one that come from some traumatic lifting event are easy to remember.
The wild card is troubleshooting running problems is whether or not continuing to run will make them worse. I always come down on the continuing to run side, and for the main part, it's worked out for me. But there are some injuries that simply get worse if you don't give them a week or two to heal up, or at least, back off on your normal pace or distance. The only way I know to identify the injuries that are made worse by running is to go out and run and see what happens. Of course, the problem there is that most of the time, an injury causes the worst pain and affects the stride most at the beginning of the run. If I keep at it, and everything loosens up and feels better after a mile or two, I figure it's OK to go on. But if the pain increases or the limp gets worse, I try to turn around before I reach the halfway point.
One trick that has helped me heal quicker and not get into trouble when running injured is that after fifteen years or so of running, I finally established a rehab route, which means instead of doing my usual cross-country run, I just run about a half mile to a little park where I can do three quarter mile loops. For one thing, it's a flat route, and going up or downhill can aggravate many injuries. But more importantly, it's psychologically easier to break off short on my rehab route and just jog or walk home. I've occasionally stuck to the rehab route for weeks at a time, increasing the number or laps around the inside of the park until I'm confident I can run one of my regular cross country routes without making things worse.
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Is the problem you achilles tendon? I don't know what percentage of runners have had Achilles problems, but I'd guess it's very high. The main relief I know for Achilles is to raise the heel in the shoe and to try to run with the minimum of foot flexing, The Achilles connects the calf muscle to the foot and is the main control for the foot position, so heavy ankle taping reduces foot movement and can help, providing the taping doesn't aggravate the Achilles itself. I remember once, many years ago, I started with some torn ankle ligaments, taped heavily to continue running, and ended up with an Achilles problem, so I tend to avoid taping for Achilles myself.
Achilles tendon pain can be crippling, especially in your normal walking around life. The Achilles tends to loosen up with use, I think what happens is that the adhesions between the tendon and the tendon sheath either tear free or get lubricated (hopefully not with blood) as the day goes on. During the more than a half a year of my worst Achilles injury, I was running late at night, often past midnight, every other day. The next morning, walking more than a couple hundred yards was extremely painful and stairs were a killer, but by the end of the day it would just be a dull pain. The second morning would be fairly bad again, especially with the stairs, but by night it would just be a little sore, so I would go out and run and start the whole cycle all over again.
Many runners develop Achilles problems as the pick up their pace, changing their stride and requiring more foot action, or when new sneakers lead to a change in the footstrike. But lifting heavy items or pushing heavy objects is the easiest way to do in your Achilles. My worst injury came helping a friend in graduate school move a vacuum pump in the VLSI lab (he was letting me use his scanning electron microscope without funding). As we lifted the pump and motor, which were mounted on a skid made from welded steel i-beam, my whole leg started trembling violently, and my heel kept pooping up and then slapping the floor again, very rapidly. I couldn't drop my end, it being a two-man lift, so I shifted my weight to the other leg, and limped heavily to where we put it down. I found the manual later and looked up the weight, the pump was 150 pounds and the electric motor was 180 pounds, and I had the motor end. That's not counting the skid. That particular Achilles tear didn't heel for almost nine months, not until I broke a bone in my foot and could barely walk for a month, which gave it the time it needed.
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Are you experiencing shin splints? I ran for nearly fifteen years before I developed shin splints, and I'm still not sure whether they were classic shin splints or a more general problem with muscles not healing that happened to be affecting the shins at that point. At their worst, I couldn't complete my regular running route, and basically limped on both legs wherever I went. One of the indicators of shin splints, or the tendency to get shin spins, is a bumpy shin bone, the large bone just under the skin that connects the knee bone, you know that song.
I don't like taking pills, so I don't fool around with aspirin or ibuprofen for regular pain and can't say whether or not that would help with the inflammation. Runners who go to doctors with shin splints probably end up on steroids:-) Changing sneakers is almost always the first step in treating any problem that's caused by running, which shin splints are. Changing sneakers is what worked for me, and interestingly enough, it was a change from expensive sneakers to some cheapo $39 Sauconys that did the charm. I ended up buying a couple more pairs of those Sauconys by mail order, since they were already at the end of the product life cycle. You might also try to improve your stretching regime, because if your calf muscles aren't stretched, it may contribute to the muscles on the front of the leg around the shin getting overworked.
Some runners tape for shin splints, to try to stabilize the shin. That would require taping below the knee and above the ankle where the shin bone connect, but I've never tried it. Shin splints might be confused with calf cramping, because the calves may spasm in order to protect the shin muscles. I've never been a fan of orthotics, as much as some runners swear by them, and I've known enough people who use orthotics for years only to have the original problems return. I think there's actually some value in changing sneaker brands from time to time, just so your feet (and footstrike) gets a little variety. Some of the serious runners I know alternate sneakers every days.
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Do you have cramping calfs? Calf cramps hit the back of the lower leg, and unlike shin splints, which I can usually limp through, a calf muscle spasm can pull me up like I've been hamstringed. Sneakers are the first place to start, especially is you recently changed, and padding out the heel of the sneaker may help as well. I've actually used store bough inserts or orthotics, like Dr. Shoals, and put them in the sneaker without removing the standard insole. It's a little tricky in terms of fit, but it lifts up the heel and complete alters the whole footstrike, not to mention giving your back some padding. The problem with padding out that far is stability, so it's not recommended if you have weak ankles, unless you're going to tape every time you run.
Hydration can play a part in any type of cramping, and I've found calf cramps to be far more likely if I get up and run in the morning. I don't know if that's because the morning glass of water takes a while to get absorbed, or if drinking coffee or alcohol at night was sometimes the culprit, or even just an insufficient stretching routine. If you stretch in the morning, that's all the loosening up you get, whereas if you run later in the day, at least you've probably done some walking around and bending as well. Stretching is critical to avoiding spasms, but it can also lead to injuries if you overdo it. I used to stretch much more aggressively, and it led to minor Achilles problems, so I backed off.
Calf cramps can also be a sign of an unbalanced diet or poor absorption of vitamins and nutrients in the small intestine. If the basic mechanical changes (sneakers, running stride, easier route) don't improve calf cramps, you might want to try a multi vitamin. Many people who get calf cramps at night claim that potassium takes care of the problem, either taken as a vitamin supplement or eating more potassium rich foods, like bananas. If you've ever noticed runner munching bananas before or after a meet, that's probably the theory behind it, even if they've long since forgotten.
During the couple years that I had bad, recurring calf cramps, I frequently got them just as bad walking as running. For a couple summers, if I wasn't limping on one leg, I was limping on the other leg, or hobbling along on both. It actually started when I was running very early in the morning, around 5:00 AM, but it didn't improve that much when I went back on a later schedule. I think when I started eating a banana with breakfast every morning, it really did help.
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Is the issue muscle fatigue? There's a big difference between being a little tired or hungry, and suffering from muscle fatigue. For example, I used to have a glass of water and run after Yom Kippur, say 26 or 27 hours of fasting, and while I wasn't bursting with energy, running without having had anything to eat or being properly hydrated isn't a big deal if you're healthy. It's tougher to work all day and run, especially if you're doing outside work, lifting and carrying, cutting down trees and cleaning up, building rock walls, etc. I used to try to get up early and run before those work days because it's just not that much fun dragging yourself along for five or six miles afterwards.
But real muscle fatigue, a daily occurrence when you run even if you aren't doing physical labor, is a sign something is wrong. For starters, you could be pretty sick. Lots of who run no matter what end up running with lung infections, which take forever to heal without antibiotics, assuming they don't get worse. Any long term intestinal problems that reduce the efficiency of your digestive system can lead to malnutrition, no matter how well you are eating, which results in muscle fatigue and poor healing, amongst other problems It could even be depression, though running in itself is one of the best treatments for depression.
Ongoing muscle weakness can be a sign of may serious problems, all of those horrible diseases affecting the nervous system, or muscular degeneration. If eating a high glucose energy bar before running keeps you from getting tired, it's probably just your diet. Ironically, potassium, which is recommended to fight muscle cramps, can be responsible for muscle weakness if you get too much of it. But if you suffer from real muscle weakness, like the inability to climb stairs, run uphill, despite the fact you are making your utmost exertion, you should think about seeing a doctor.
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Have you experienced a full leg spasm? The only times I've suffered from full leg spasms, from the groin and lower back down to the calf, have been when I had some specific injury that my body was trying to splint to get me off my feet. Once it was a pulled groin, but the worst was a cracked bone in the foot. Quick piece of advice. If you are breaking up branches for the trash, don't hold a hardwood branch 3" or so in diameter off the ground while stamping on it with one foot in an attempt to break it. You're more likely to break a bone in your foot. When I woke up the next morning to leave on a cross-country drive, I was limping badly before I made the door, and had to hold myself up on the car to work around to the drive side. The whole leg was spasmed and I couldn't more than just touch the foot to the ground without picking it up again. Four hundred miles later (eight hours of sitting) when I stopped to buy gas, I had to hold onto the car roof to work around to the passenger side of the car for fueling. It's was literally a month before I could walk without some spasming, and a good six weeks before I could run.
If your upper leg muscles, groin muscles, and lower back muscles are all in spasm, you may not even figure out what the injury is until they loosen up enough to make it obvious. Lower back injuries can also lead to major muscle spasms in the legs, though surprisingly, I don't recall knee sprains causing any muscle spasms at all - they just hurt. Ibuprofen may help relax the muscles and prevent them from damaging themselves, or a hot bath, but staying off your feet is the main thing. I remember being amazed how little distance I could manage, even walking softly, before all of the leg muscles began locking up. The body has a mind of it's own for such things, you likely have more pain from the spasms than from whatever fractured bone the muscles are all spasming to protect.
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Are you getting foot (arch) cramps? A pain like a toothache building in your arch while you run and finally spasming rock hard (usually when you stop) that even hurts worse if you try to massage it out. The pain persists even after the spasm is gone, and may come back to haunt you anytime you walk more than a couple blocks. Other than limping, I've found taping the foot right over the arch helps greatly with this, even though I don't understand the underlying cause. It seems to me I get it most often in the summer, so it may have to do with insufficient hydration as I often underestimate how much water I need to drink. I've experimented with all sorts of arch supports, sandals, even those rubber sandals with all the points sticking up that are supposed to massage your feet when you walk. Some of them feel kind of good, but the same way that picking at something stick in your gum may feel good. Changing sneakers can't hurt, or replacing the insole with a store bought orthotics that has better arch support.
As near as I can tell, the main cause of my arch cramps is carelessly putting my feet on the rung of a chair, the edge of a platform, anything where the weight is carried by the middle of the arch. You'd think wearing sneakers or even construction boots, it wouldn't matter, but time and time again, I've been able to trace serious foot cramps to having had my feet up on something where the heels aren't carrying the load. I don't know if that position overstretches the little muscles in the foot, are bruises the tendon sheathing, but I've largely learned to avoid it and rarely ever have those arch spasms anymore.
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Is the pain from a groin strain? I've had one pad groin pull in my life, happened cross country skiing in heavy wet snow. After limping home, I put on sneakers and tried to run five miles over the same route I'd been skiing. Ah, to be thirty and stupid again. Typically, I had to move out of my apartment the next morning and leave for a trip overseas, so even though I was mainly balancing on one leg fighting spasms, I didn't get a chance to rest it until I was settled in somewhere with my stuff a couple days later. The effects of the groin injury have been with me for sixteen years now, and I'm not going to go into all of them. But I will put in my sole plug for alternative medicine (keep in mind though, I never went to a real doctor, maybe that fix would have been better:-) After a couple years of being unable to touch my toes with my left knee bending before I got all the way down and a sharp pain in the groin, I decided to try a chiropractor. On the second visit, he got something deep in the hip to go "pop", and I've been able to touch my toes without any groin pain ever since. I don't know if it was scar tissue or an adhesion, but it never came back.
But a dull pain, from the groin down along the inside of the leg, stayed around, and seems to come and go most years. When I started doing a full routine of floor exercises to fight the back pain problems that cause occasional pain and large numb patch on front of my left thigh, I discovered that stretching the left groin hurt like hell - this some fourteen years after the initial injury. The stretch, lying on my back with both knees up, and letting the left knee down with the left foot pressed to the inside of the right knee, has slowly improved the mobility, but a minor slip after more than a year of doing the stretches and it went back to hurting pretty good to lift the knee back up in that stretch. So groins are not only a slow, slow, heal, but subject to reinjury - this based on a case study of one:-)
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Do you have back pain? Running and back pain go together like running and sneakers. Did I mention that the first thing to try is new sneakers or inserts? I'f your problem isn't serious, a softer ride may make all the difference. But many people with who run with back pain have structural problems, such as minor differences in leg length or other asymmetries. I have some spinal curvature, scoliosis is that fancy medical term, that an orthopedic doctor pointed out to me (and to whoever else in the room he thought might learn something by it) when I went into the university clinic with shoulder pain around twenty five years ago. The shoulder pain still comes and goes, probably some combination of bursitis and the effect of have a skewed body.
The interesting thing about spinal curvature is that you can often detect it without the aide of a doctor or a mirror (when it's bad, you're simply crooked) by standing against a wall or laying on a smooth flat floor. Standing against a wall, it always feels like my right shoulder blade is sticking out and grating on the wall, I can't feel the shoulder blade at all. When I took up floor stretching exercises a couple years ago, I realized that my left shoulder "floats" a little higher than the right, but it wasn't until I did those exercises on a polished marble floor while traveling that I realized my whole torso is a little racked. If I lie on my back, swing my arms out over my head, the left shoulder picks up off the floor as a stretch. If the left shoulder is forced down, my right hip comes off the floor. In other words, my whole body is a little twisted.
When you have structural problems, changing your running stride might help, the right shoe inserts might help, or simply building up the thickness of one shoe using thin layer of rubber inside or glue gun glue outside. Personally, I've read about all of those things but never had luck with the ones I tried. What works best for me is simply doing the maximum amount of back and abdominal exercises I have the patience for, to strengthen the muscles that stabilize the spine. I also try to be smart about sitting, with limited success, to avoid sitting with my legs straight out and anything else that puts stress on the lower back. I've never run with a back brace, I have a fear of support devices leading to a weakening of the body's natural stability.
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Are your muscles tight while running? Back when I did a lot of weight lifting and sawyering (dragging around trees and lifting heavy slabs of wood), my back always hurt, and and the lower back would always tighten up when I walked or ran. For a while, I took Ibuprofen before running, which helped loosen up the back but did nothing for the underlying problem, which I assume was crunched discs in the spinal column, and I eventually decided that running with pain and knowing what was happening made more sense than masking the pain and losing the sensitivity of how hard it was OK to push. I think it was the sore back and tightness that first led me to start stretching aggressively, which of course, led to stretching injuries:-) In the end, I standardized on doing 50 crunches and 10 slow toe touches before running, which seems to be the right mix for me.
Some runners have much more aggressive stretching routines, including elevating a leg straight out from the body on something and stretching the hamstring and the calf. Every time I tried doing more aggressive stretches, I ended up with problems, usually Achilles strains, which any trainer would say means I was stretching wrong. These days I also do a fifteen minute routine of floor exercises the night before I run, mainly intended for back strengthening.
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Do you suffer from muscle spasms, leg burn? Many runners choose to go out and run even with back spasms, as long as they can move their legs. I used to be in that camp, if I could stand, I was going to try to run, and I don't know that it did any damage. While going out and adding more pounding to a pinched disc or even a rupture may sound stupid, the spasmed muscles carry a good bit of the load, transferring it around the lower back, and there are general healing benefits to aerobic exercise on the other side of the scale. Maybe I'm just trying to convince myself. In any case, I though at one time that back spasms would put an end to my running days, but they largely cleared up when I stopped lifting hundreds of pounds.
Leg burn, which is probably sciatica, is something I've had off and on since doing some overly heavy work for my body some fifteen years ago. These days, it returns after running if I've been doing heavy work or let my sneakers go to long, but it used to kick in after a couple miles, with a burning feeling and pins and needles down the left thigh. The skin over my left thigh is always a little numb, sometimes to the point of no feeling, other times more a limb that's fallen asleep due to the blood circulation getting cut off, and after fifteen years, I have no expectation this will ever clear up. What's more annoying is that recently, I get a point of burning pain in the middle of the numb area, and I haven't quite associated it with any particular activity yet.
Other than strengthening exercises and softer sneakers, the only other thing I've had any luck with is a softer running surface. I've had much worse pack problems running during the periods of time that my routes have included large amounts of concrete sidewalks. Asphalt is a much softer running surface, and cross country over dirt and grass is even kinder, though the broken surfaces lead to their own issues.
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Is the problem hip pain? When my left hip developed a chronic pain that felt like it was deep in the joint, I thought my running days would soon be over. It didn't make sense to have a hip joint wearing out in my early 40's, so I stuck with my usual approach of giving it a few months to see if it got worse, and then giving it a few years to see if it would get better. I think it took around a year before I noticed one day that my hip didn't hurt anymore, probably after a couple month hiatus from running, but walking at least 10 miles a day in hilly Jerusalem. It simply heeled itself, I don't remember changing sneakers, taking up any new exercises, anything of the sort. But then again, I don't remember whether the pain originally came out of nowhere or if I wrenched the joint on my cross country track or doing heavy lifting.
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Are you having trouble with knee pain? I've had two nasty knee injuries in my life, the first of which was when I was in Jr. High. playing soccer and ran full tilt into a bigger kid, knee-to-knee, where I took all the damage. It's also the only time I ever had an X-ray for an injury, which showed up negative, but it continued to hurt for many months. The knee injury I had in my mid-thirties was more typical for running, a bad sprain. I don't remember if I stepped in a hole or simply twisted it by planting badly while looking off to the side somewhere, but it seem to sprain more to the front than the side. It showed the typical torn ligament damage of blood accumulating under the skin, a large bruise right above the shin bone and below the knee cap. I was able to start running again without a major lay-off, but with a lot of pain, and the most fear I remember having while running. The fear was that it would sprain again, and worse.
So I went through a series of knee braces after found that ace bandages were worthless in this application and taping doesn't work, at least I couldn't do it so the knee still bent. The first brace was one of those white cloth type things with flexible metal strips on both sides and a hole right over the knee cap to keep it centered. This gave me a great deal of confidence, and I wore it for many months, but it also bothered a tendon behind the knee because it was too rigid or tight. At some point, I shifted to a larger neoprene brace, the same stuff (I think) they make cold water diving suits out of. That brace was very comfortable, and frankly, I became addicted to it. Over a year after I sprained the knee, I had to psych myself into giving up the brace. There was still a sharp little pain in the knee when I started out running each time, but after I gave up the brace, it cleared up fairly quickly, so it was possibly scar tissue that formed because the knee wasn't going through its full range of motion.
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Do you get dizzy or have trouble with your balance? First disclaimer is that I'm somebody who's always gotten dizzy for no particular reason, and I get dizzy less while running than while walking. Getting up from chairs or bed in hot summer weather is has always produced random dizzy spells, which I assume are due to blood rushing to fill the legs or something like that. My blood pressure is in the normal range. Not surprisingly, the dizzy spells I get running are usually on the hottest days of the summer, when I run in the afternoon rather than the morning or night. I think of it as stupidity rather than as a health issue.
Balance is a slightly different issue. I learned I have an eye condition (I forgot the name) when I was running one day and noticed that the phone poles didn't go all the way to the ground. They broke about five feet up, there was an air space where they were shifted over, and then continued down. Since I knew all the phone poles on the street could be broken and suspended in the air, I got pretty nervous about my eyesight and went to the opthamologist. Turns out that I have a distortion in the cornea or lens, not correctable, which means I see a little double out of my left eye, and with sweat and heat, it gets somewhat worse. I also realized at this time that if I look at bright objects at night, like the moon, rather than one moon, I see a whole circle of moons, with two or four of them just as bright as the original, and a bunch of faded ones filling in the circle. Good thing I'm not a pilot:-)
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Do you get a side cramp? New runners usually experience side cramps for a couple weeks until they become accustomed to running. It's when an experience runner gets side cramps that you have to wonder. A girl I used to work with frequently got side cramps, even though she'd been running for years, but she found that pushing her stiffened fingers into her side relieved it. I used to get the occasional cramp if I forgot to drink enough water before running, but for the main part, side cramps probably have more to do with digestive issues than with running problems. If you are already bloated before running, you might get some relief while running, but develop cramps after a few miles that you wouldn't normally expect. I figure it's just gas, and find if I can burp or break wind they normally go away.
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Have you had an ankle sprain? Ankle sprains are endemic to running. I've sprained both ankles many times over the years, I say it's rare to go two years running without at least a minor sprain. But minor sprains are just that, a bit of swearing and staggering to catch your balance and continuing on. If they swell up later or hurt badly the next day, I'll usually tape the ankle a few weeks for support. Major sprains, resulting from torn ligaments, are another matter altogether. Some people actually have surgery for ankle sprains, which seems pretty over the top to me unless you are a professional athlete. I divide ankle sprains into side sprains and front sprains, where front sprains (usually from planting a foot on the down slope of an unseen hole) are especially nasty.
Bad ankle sprains mean torn ligaments, which generally show bruising on the skin, and sometimes result in enough bleeding that it pools at the bottom of the foot and changes all sorts of nasty colors. It doesn't mean that the foot is infected, the blood get broken down and reabsorbed by the body after a few days, it just looks like something awful is going on. I did a little reading about ankle sprains after a major tear, and the author claimed that all ligament tears are capable of healing themselves, even if the tear has gone all the way through and the ligament needs to reattach itself. The problem is that ligaments are that flexible, so with repeated stretching (minor sprains) or tears, they can lengthen over time and end up being too loose, making sprains a regular occurrence.
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Are you taping for a sprain? Once I got the side and front at the same time after planting a foot in an asphalt sinkhole, got flipped right onto my back after a double bounce on the ankle. Being an idiot, I tried running back, but after a half mile or so the whole thing hurt and burned so badly that I figured I was doing more damage than necessary and settled for limping home. The whole ankle swelled up with blood, it turned all sorts of interesting colors over the next couple days, and I could barely touch the foot to the floor a day later. I tried a whole series of ankle braces and ace bandages before discovering tape, the ankle braces were worse than useless. It was a good couple weeks after that before I could start running again, it was hard enough just limping around the apartment. But that's when I discovered athletic tape, and fell in love with the stuff. It didn't get rid of the ankle pain, which persisted for a couple months, but it did give me full confidence in running again. In fact, I tried leaving the ankle taped all the time for a couple months, I don't remember what the drawbacks were, and giving up the tape when I figured the ligaments had had enough time to heal was as tough as giving up that knee brace.
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Do you experience footpain? Don't overlook simple bruising. The first thing to try is new sneakers or soft inserts and see if the pain clears up, or at least changes. There are a surprising number of bones in the foot, and some people even have an extra bone that comes to light when it starts causing pain with the regular pounding of running. Any pounding type pains can be helped by new, soft sneakers, though if you have other stride issues, changing to soft sneakers can lead to knee problems or other issues. Some foot injuries are less painful in the foot than higher up the leg. When I broke a bone in my foot many years ago being an idiot, the main ongoing problem was that all the muscles in the leg would go into spasm to try to keep me off of it. In other words, my body is appreciably smarter than I am.
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Is the pain under the toes or the ball of the foot? Another common running problem is a pain like you're running with a pebble or a marble in your shoe, when there's nothing there but your foot. I used to get this feeling in the web between the big toe and the second toe, and sometimes a little further back and down. It seems to me this was the first usage injury I can remember from running, going back over twenty years, to when I lived in Lowell, not far from the New Balance Factory in Lawrence. Since I didn't have any money at the time, I ran in my first pair of New Balance for over a year, five miles a day, not realizing that sneakers wear out. The I bought Saucony for my next running shoes, and quickly developed that marble in the shoe feeling that drove me nuts. Less than pain, more than aggravation. My initial fix involved cutting out a hole in in the insole at that area, and didn't help for long. What did help a great deal was laboriously sawing off the triangular stud on the sole under that location with a razor. Ever since that time I've avoided sneakers that use raised triangles in the sole design for traction, which I believe includes some models of Nike and Addidas as well.