Your Top INJURY PREVENTION tips.

Consistency, I've run for 12 years averaging 90 miles a week but I've never had a single injury because I never increased my mileage by more than 10% and I rarely take needless days off. it sounds crazy, but the proof is in the pudding.

some things that i have done after a stress fracture and had no other injury problems since.

Ran on grass/gravel 50% of my mileage other 50% on roads/concrete

Improved my diet

Did strengthening excercises

Rotate shoes

Build up mileage properly

Recovered on recovery days

Iced on any signs of injuries/soreness

as soon as you get a twinge anywhere try different strengthening exercises, usually just with body weight, until you feel it helping and the pain stops. I couldn't make it a week or two without getting injured on light mileage and not that many workouts in high school and college but at 43 I've just reached 4,000 miles running for the fifth straight year primarily because of those exercises. Some of the big ones are the eccentric calf drops for achilles, the bass drum pedal for shin splints and excessive eccentric calf drops (strengthening the calf can give you shin splints), and quad strengthening exercises with ankle weights.

get new shoes when you start feeling achilles problems (and do the exercises).

you can maintain mileage with the exercises when you feel the injuries coming on but adjust intensity or surfaces if appropriate. grass is often so uneven that injuries await but well groomed dirt trails with few ankle twisting possibilities will really help you avoid stress fractures.

Don't go into the well every session

Do what the Washington Senators have done: Don't compete. They have a top notch pitcher who helped them make it to the playoffs, and they're NOT letting him pitch so they can save him for next year. That is like making the Olympic team, be injury free, but not running in the Olympics so you can not risk getting injured.

I hope Washington loses every game and never makes it back to the playoffs, and Strassburg gets the heck out of town

Variety of surfaces. If you run on grass, get on the road more. If you run on the trails, hit the track once in a while. If you always run flat, hit the hills. Injuries are due to overusing them in the same way. So use them in different ways.

Yoga. There may be arguments to this, but as you get older you'll need to maintain flexibility for good health, which will keep your muscles healthy. Yoga is good because it strengthens and lengthens at the same time.

Drills. They seem to help me. If you feeling like you are about to be hurt don't do it.

Also, the runners that stay consistent are the ones that nip problems in the bud. I was out 10 weeks off/on from a stress fracture. I know for sure if I had just taken off 2 weeks when it first started I would have been healed, but instead I kept on running on it. Take a day off if something hurts and it may save you from taking off a month down the road.

Bump

prometheus_bounding wrote:

#1 Soft surfaces

#2 cycle through a 'stable' of shoes through the week

#3 ditch heavy shoes and let your lower legs get strong

#4 ice and massage (the trick is always to make it through the danger zone between injury and getting back at it if you can offset injury and slowly increase your mileage you will never look back thus icing and massaging are critical)

#5 See 1-4

I don't really do any of these on a regular basis, and I have missed only a handful of days in the past 7 years due to injury.

It's all about the butt...keep it strong - will protect your back, hips, knees; will give you better shock absorption running, with hills, and power; and keep you from faulty running mechanics.....generally speaking. All about the butt!!!

Good, solid warm-up before running. 10 minutes minimum.

Foam rolling anything tight or sore.

Keeping yourself in good footwear.

Not running yourself into the ground has to figure into this discussion in an important way. Some people want to run through a wall which is great but if you get through the wall and you have tendonitis somewhere and are out for a month it didn't do you much good. So being smart.

Ice bath or ice as frequently as possible at the end of a session.

Mine's a catch 22: never listen to my injury-prevention advice.

calling it like it is x2 wrote:

Get strong glutes/adductors/abductors. Basically muscles that can get rejected if you only run over a long period of time. Strong ankles too. And rows for a healthy back, in order to provide you with more stability for your discs, which are very important to maintain esp if your family or you is prone to back pain.

Lunges, adductor/abductor machines, ankle strengthening exercises, and rows. Stay healthy doods

+1

I'm really stupid and I've been injured probably eight garpskrillion times, so I know what I'm talking about.

1. Run your easy days easy.

1.5. No really, run your easy days ACTUALLY easy. If you are paying attention to your pace, you're probably not going easy enough. I know you think you need to run 6:30 pace to reassure yourself that you're a good, brave, fast runner, and you've somehow managed to convince yourself that you can recover at this pace, but you're wrong.

1.75 I sense that you still aren't completely sold on the idea that you should run your easy days easy. But seriously. Do it.

2. When in doubt, don't be afraid to take a day off or push a workout back a day or two. You'll benefit much more from consistent training over a LONG period than consistent training over any isolated stretch of time (in other words, it matters more how many miles/workouts/races you run over the course of a year than how many miles/workouts/races you run during any given week).

3. Cross train before you need to. I skate ski in the winter and do the elliptical when there's no snow on the ground. And if I'm getting back into running after time off, I force myself to cross train every other day or every third day even if I feel like I could run.

4. All those little strengthening exercises that your ath. trainers/physical therapists tell you to do? Do them. All of them. As many times as they tell you to do them. Even clam shells. No, ESPECIALLY clam shells.

5. Walk to keep your legs loose. My car broke down twice during college. Once for about a year and another time for about 6 months (I was super poor and didn't have enough money to fix it). I had to walk to get coffee every morning and walk to campus (about 3 miles total spread out over the day). Despite how monumentally stupid I was being with my training, I was still relatively injury free during both of those time periods. I only realized the correlation retrospectively, but I've been playing around with the idea lately and so far it seems to yield similar results. I don't know if I'd recommend adding three whole miles of walking, but one mile with my dog in the morning seems to do the trick perfectly.

6. Pay attention to the camber of the roads you run on. Try to stay off cambered roads as much as possible.

7. If your pelvis is all whack and out of control, take measures to make it be the right way instead. Do even more clam shells than you were already doing.

8. In workouts, try to shift your pace more smoothly. You aren't trying to set a world record in the 100 (or maybe you are, in which case, disregard), so there's no reason not to allow yourself a bit of acceleration into your top gears. Just three or four steps of transition is all it takes.

9. When in doubt, wear tights. If really super in doubt, at least wear knee socks.

10. Be patient. Be realistic. If you're very honest with yourself, you can tell when you're about to be a raging idiot, and you can stop yourself before you ruin all of your goals. Learn how to say "no" to yourself when there's a possibility that you're being a raging idiot.

Great stuff man, thanks.

Recovery:

1. Foam rolling

2. Tennis ball (don't do it in public if your humping the ball to reach you adductors)

3. Dynamic stretches if you 'feel tight' and static stretches if you lack range of motion in your hip or ankle

Strengthening:

1. lots of hip and glute work

2. Some abs work or trunk work

3. Ankle stability work

No brainers:

1. Come back easy if you are coming back from an injury

2. Don't be a slave to mileage

3. Lay off the speed for a while if you fell like crap...(no pun intended)

1) single-leg balancing every day for 2-3 min/leg on one of those rubber discs

do stuff while you're on it to make it challenging (throw & catch ball against wall or over should, do squats & raise opposite knee to chest in running post, etc.)

really strengthens glutes & stabilizers in lower legs & feet. has helped me get over injuries including ITBS and peroneal tendonitis + i think it has made me a waaaay more efficient runner (hips feel more stable in plant & push-off phases)

2) short sprints nearly every day

anything from 4-5x up a short hill in trainers to flying 30s on the track in spikes

feel it keeps the muscles in my feet/lower legs strong and less prone to injury, especially during track season...introducing stuff like 8x400 on the track in flats or spikes into my training is less of a shock if i am consistently doing short sprints year-round in training.

I see the guy who is pressing easy recovery runs. Would it be better just to do some easy biking for an hour? I mean, if you are a low milage guy or are injury prone already would it make sense to recover via cross training? I am no coach and don't know a whole lot, I'm just wondering.

you might as well recover while doing an activity that is as running-specific as possible...so i say shuffling at 8min+ pace for 30-40min is better than any alternative (pool running, elliptical, rowing machine, biking, etc). ingraining that running muscle memory in your skull and practicing the skill of running everyday (no matter how fast or slow) will make you more efficient over the long-term IMO.if you have the discipline to be consistent and put in the hard work 3-4 days a week, then you possess the discipline to go slow the other days. you just gotta do it. find what works: run with a slow friend, leave the watch behind, run an unmarked trail, jog boring-ass laps on a grass field, put the treadmill at 8min pace and keep your arse on there without touching the buttons, etc.

J Rock wrote:

I see the guy who is pressing easy recovery runs. Would it be better just to do some easy biking for an hour? I mean, if you are a low milage guy or are injury prone already would it make sense to recover via cross training? I am no coach and don't know a whole lot, I'm just wondering.

Twice I tried training for a marathon and both times ended up with a severe tibial stress fracture. What both the incidences had in common was that they came after I was juuuuuuuuust trying to squeeze in another 10 miles at the end of the week, for no reason other than trying to hit a certain number of miles I had planned for that week. So my injury prevention strategy has been to limit the number of miles and compensate as much as possible through non-impact cross-training. The vast majority of people aren't built for high mileage (or running in general). We don't all have narrows shoulders and skinny calves like the Kenyans do.