How to prevent running injuries!
Running for exercise, competition, or purely for fun is a common and accessible way to get movement in during the week. However, between novice runners and expert runners alike, running injuries are a plague that can sideline runners for weeks or months. Every runner wants to know - how can I prevent myself from getting injured? While it’s not always possible to prevent every single injury, there are many modifiable factors that can help either prevent injury or decrease the severity, and keep runners on the roads and trails.
What causes running injuries?
Besides the occasional trauma of a rolled ankle, or tripping on a root and falling on the trail, most running injuries are “overuse” injuries. Due to the repetitive nature of running, over time certain areas become stressed faster than they can recover in between runs. Let’s use bones as an example.
When you run, the repetitive impact can cause stress to the bones. When you rest and recover, that stress stimulates the body to repair any microtrauma, and even builds the bones back even stronger. However, if for some reason the body cannot repair the bones as quickly as the bone is being broken down, the trauma can accumulate over time and lead to a stress fracture, where the bone breaks due to repetitive overuse.
The same process can happen in joints, muscles, or tendons, where the body does not repair the tissue as quickly as it is being stressed, and an injury develops over time.
What impacts the balance between stress and recovery?
You can think of running as a balance between stress and recovery. Stress is all the things that load your tissues:
Increasing running volume (miles per week): More steps = more stress
Increasing running intensity (speed, harder surfaces than usual, increased hills): usually leads to higher ground reaction forces and more stress per step
Areas of localized stress: muscle weakness or poor body mechanics putting increased mechanical stress on your foot/knee/hip/low back, increasing the breakdown in a specific area
Increased LIFE stress: working longer hours, family obligations, pandemics.. General stress changes your hormones and can affect the way your body responds to exercise.
Recovery can be all the things that help you restore your body’s tissues:
Sleep!! This is when your body does most of its repair work and is very important!
Nutrition: You need the building blocks to heal your tissues after any type of workout.
Adequate time between hard efforts. This is different for different people and depends on your own training history and health!
Other recovery techniques? This is debated, but some people feel that activities like stretching, foam rolling, cryotherapy, massage guns, etc can help with recovery. Most of these techniques are not harmful and they may help, but they do not substitute for sleep, nutrition, and time.
How can a physical therapist help?
While many runners who take their time increasing their training volume and intensity and get plenty of recovery will do just fine, many others have certain body areas of localized increased stress that can create an injury over time. Physical therapists are trained to evaluate mobility, posture, strength, and running technique, and can help guide patients towards specific training exercises to improve weak spots and improve the body’s resilience to running. Seeing a physical therapist before changing or increasing your running can help identify those weak spots, and hopefully prevent an overuse injury from happening.
A good running assessment should look in-depth not only at a runner’s strength and mechanics but also evaluate the whole picture. What is the training schedule, how much sleep is the runner getting, what are other life stressors going on. This way, with a solid plan, runners can improve the chances of enjoying their runs without being sidelined by an injury.