by Neil Bates

Created on: April 18, 2009

There are many ways of preventing side stitch. Eating at least an hour before exercise, keeping well hydrated, during and before exercise or even exercises to strengthen the muscles of your stomach and abdomen. However, I want to focus on how to get rid of it while you are out on a run. Prevention is always better than cure I agree, but you also need to know how to cure it just in case you are caught out.

If you feel a stitch coming on, do not slow down. Working through it is the best way and follow these measures.

Check your Posture.

Adopt a more erect position, making sure that your back is straight and that you are standing tall and stretching the stomach muscles. This not only will actually improve your running style and could actually allow you to run faster, but it also allows the cramping of the stomach muscles to be stretched out. Keep concentrating on your posture and keep moving forward and hopefully the stitch will ease.

Check your breathing.

Long deep breaths will help you with your stitch. Long deep breaths that use your lungs to their full capacity will get more oxygen into your body. The more oxygen then the more blood cells moving around the veins. These blood cells will help neutralise the toxins in the stomach muscles and the spasms will then decrease.

The added benefit from continues long deep breaths and using the lungs to their full capacity is the movement it causes within your body. The slow inflation and deflation of the lungs on a continuous basis along with the diaphragm will help massage the stomach muscles too helping ease the pain. It will stimulate and accelerate the digestion of any contents in the stomach that are causing the cramps as well as any stomach acid that may be in excess causing cramping and a unwell feeling.

Posture and breathing are two of the simplest ways of getting rid of stitch once it occurs. Many other people, coaches and athletes have other ideas too. Some research is being done into increasing your speed if stitch occurs. However, this is basically the same as having the right posture and the right breathing.

I found that actual self-massaging of the painful area during exercise has also always helped, however I have known it not help for other athletes too. It also has the added problem of showing a sign of weakness, which in a competitive situation, may not be the best option.

You can also use psychology basically, putting mind over matter. This is the same as any other pains you may feel while exercising, you can to a point work past them and the gentle exercise will actually ease the pain. This is basically the same with stitch. The best thing to do is keep going. Stopping and starting will ultimately make it worse. Keeping the same movement will actually help work through the stitch and actually get rid of it.

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