The short answer
- Where you can point narrows the list faster than any test you can do at home.
- How it behaves during a run narrows it further: building and easing, arriving at a fixed point, or worsening run by run.
- A spot you can cover with one fingertip, on bone, getting worse each run, is the pattern that means stop and get it looked at.
- Pain that spreads, burns or goes numb is nerve language and points somewhere different from ache and tenderness.
- Use this page as the index. Each region links to the article that goes into the detail.
Two questions get you most of the way. Where exactly does it hurt, and what does it do over the course of a run.
This page is the index. If you would rather click a body map than read a list, we have the interactive version with a home test for each region.
Start with one finger
Put one finger on the sore spot and see whether you can cover it.
Spread out and vague is one kind of answer. A patch you can cover with a fingertip is another, and if that patch is directly on bone and getting worse run by run, that is the one pattern on this page that means stop now rather than read on.
No single test names a running injury on its own. The meta-analysis of clinical tests for kneecap pain found none accurate enough to stand alone1, and that holds across the body. The pattern does the work.
Knee
The most commonly reported region in running injury research, with pain around the kneecap the single most frequent complaint2.
Vague ache around or behind the kneecap, worse on stairs down, downhills and after sitting, fits patellofemoral pain.
Sharp pain on the outside of the knee that arrives at the same point in every run and eases when you walk with a straighter leg fits IT band syndrome.
Joint line pain with catching or locking is a different question, covered in meniscus tears and running.
If you cannot tell which, knee pain by location sorts all five.
And if someone has told you your knees will wear out, running and arthritis has the numbers.
Shin
Three things live here and the sore patch tells them apart.
Soreness spread along five centimetres or more of the inside bone edge is shin splints. One small tender spot on bone, worse each run, is a bone stress injury. Shin pain: the size of the sore patch covers both, and the bone one is the reason to read it today rather than next week.
Tightness that builds at a predictable distance, forces you to stop, then vanishes within minutes is neither of those. That is exertional compartment syndrome.
Calf and Achilles
Bend your knee and see what changes. Calf pain: soleus or gastrocnemius explains why the knee angle sorts it.
For the tendon, where your finger lands decides the plan. Two to six centimetres above the heel bone is midportion, covered in the Achilles guide. Right on the heel bone is insertional, and the standard exercises make that one worse.
Worth testing either way: how strong your calf actually is.
Foot and ankle
Foot pain: where it hurts is the hub. Heel pain that is worst on your first steps in the morning is covered in the heel pain guide.
Along the inside of the ankle and arch: tibialis posterior. Along the outside: peroneal.
Burning, tingling or a feeling of a pebble underfoot is nerve pain in the foot instead.
Hip, groin and buttock
Outside of the hip, on the bony point, sore to lie on: gluteal tendinopathy. Thirty seconds standing on that leg is a surprisingly good test.
Front and inside: groin pain, which has four distinct versions that need different plans.
Deep in the buttock, right on the bone you sit on, worse in a chair than on a run: proximal hamstring tendinopathy.
Back of the thigh with a moment you can name: hamstring strain.
Lower back
Less common in runners than in people who do not run. Back pain and running covers why, and what the exceptions look like.
Then watch how it behaves
Location narrows it. Behaviour finishes the job.
Pain that warms up and eases in the first ten minutes, then stays eased, is usually a tissue that is sensitised rather than damaged.
Pain that builds steadily through the run and is worse at the end points at load tolerance being exceeded.
Pain that arrives at the same point every single time, and is unaffected by how you feel that day, points at something mechanical.
Pain that is worse the morning after, and worse each week despite the same training, is the one to take seriously.
The patterns that are not about tissue
Some things on this page are not injuries at a location.
Widespread soreness, poor recovery, repeated illness and a season going backwards can come from under-fuelling or overreaching. Several niggles in several places at once is a pattern, not a coincidence.
Pain that has outlasted the tissue timeline has its own explanation, covered in pain that keeps going.