Side Aches: A Pain in the Ass.

*** Everybody, welcome Tino to the B + A family. Tino is an expert on most things, music and otherwise. Enjoy! -Brian ***

Some of you may remember them, others of you probably have never had one. You know, you people out there who attended a private school in grade school, or whatever. I'm not really sure what you guys do at those private schools, well that is another topic, maybe I will come back to it in the future. Right now, as the title and opening sentence suggests, I am going to talk a little bit about side aches, apparently also known as “Side Stitches”, that is probably a European term or something because I've never heard it before.

Side Aches are a topic that most all of us have wondered about, I remember asking my mom what it was, and I was told that it was caused by drinking too much water before running around. But now that I think about it I was probably dehydrated 95% of the time when I was young, I liked to drink sodas, Capri Sun and Treetop Apple Juices. Heck I probably still am dehydrated 95% of the time. Now a decade or so later I get to thinking. How could it have been caused by drinking too much water” if I hardly drank water at all?

And so the research began, and now I am quite the expert on Side Aches.

A side ache is caused when the ligaments that attach your liver to your diaphragm are stretched. Your liver filters alcohol, hence the slang, “YOUR LIVER'S SMOKIN”, meaning you are drunk. I don't know what your Diaphragm is. While running, more than 70 percent of humans breath out when their left foot hits the ground, while 30 percent breathe out when their right foot hits the ground.¹ And us 30 percent sure do feel it, because that right there is enough to stretch those ligaments right out! My mom (and probably yours too) was semi correct in saying that it was because you “drank too much water” the added weight in your stomach can sometimes play a part in stretching that old ligament out. But it does not necessarily have to be water, it can be an excess of any food or liquid in your stomach.
So the next time you go for a run, be sure to notice when you are breathing out, if you keep this under control, you will do just fine.

If you happen to get a side ache STOP! Do not exercise any more! My advice to you is quickly try one or more of the fallowing Side-Ache-Party-Crashers before the side ache gets any worse:

• Breathe slowly out of your mouth with pursed lips.
  
• Do not fully exhale while breathing for a few paces.
  
• Bend forward and tighten your stomach muscles.
  
• Bend forward and poke out your stomach as far as you can.
  
• Wear a wide belt tightly around your waist (like weight lifters wear).
  
• Put pressure on the painful site.
  

Or take it out with the good ol One-Two punch technique that I have created:
Slouch your shoulders and push out your stomach so that it looks like you are very fat and lazy, Purse your lips and breathe slowly while drinking a beer. I find that drinking a beer while doing this helps a lot because it makes you not want to exercise and cures the side ache in a more long-term way, unlike any of these other techniques that I stole from this website.

-Tino

1 http://www.drmirkin.com/fitness/8128.htm