Firstly, let me start my first ever blog post by saying a massive hello! I hope you are all staying safe and looking after yourself and people around you during these challenging times.
For many of us, the current world we live in means our training has taken a massive hit, with gyms and leisure centres closing, events being cancelled and leagues ending early. Consequently, lots of people have seized the opportunity to experiment with home work outs, and take up new hobbies. One in particular... RUNNING!
Below are 4 tips to help keep pain and injury at a (social) distance.
Avoid doing too much too soon
Follow a training schedule or program
Improve the tissue load capacity
Get adequate rest and recovery
1. Avoid doing too much too soon
This is probably one of the most important things when it comes to avoiding pain and injury.
During exercise we expose our muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones to different levels of load (load meaning the amount of work we are asking our tissues to produce or cope with. It is the stress and strain we put our body under). The load may come from absorbing impact forces, such as your foot landing on the ground during running, or from the muscles producing repetitive contractions.
You will already have a baseline level of load that your body is able to cope with effectively, such as being able to go out for a 3 mile run and having no pain and recovering quickly at the end of it.
If we expose the body to too much load too quickly, such as jumping from a 3 mile run to an 8 mile run, we risk finding ourselves in pain and discomfort, as our body simply hasn’t physically adapted to cope with that amount yet.
On the other side of the spectrum, we do need to push ourselves and expose our bodies to more load, so that we can get those adaptions and improvements in our soft tissues that we need to improve performance. However, this exposure needs to be done slowly and gradually over a period of time. In running there is a general rule of thumb to not increase your total weekly mileage by more than 10%.
2. Follow a training schedule or program
Grab a pen and paper and write down all the exercise you did last week. Look at the following:
- Training: what type of training are you doing? Is there a lot of high impact activities, such as running? Are you resistance or weight training? Upper body or lower body? We need to make sure we have a balance throughout the week to allow time for the body to recover.
- Volume: How much are you doing of each activity? 15 minutes? Or 2 hours? 5 miles or 15 miles? 1 hour of lower body weight training? What reps, sets and weight? We can lower or increase our training volume in order to reduce the total load during each session. For example, one short run, one long run, one medium distance run per week. Or upping reps/sets.
- Intensity: How hard is your work out? Are you doing 30 minutes of a slow jog, or 30 minutes of a quick paced run? What is your heart rate like during these sessions? The easiest way to group this is by low, medium and high intensity.
- Frequency: How often are you exercising per week or per day? What times? When are you having your rest days?
Everyones training program will be different depending on individual goals. Broadly speaking a training schedule should look roughly like below:
- Have a variety of sessions. Include some strength and conditioning work along side your runs. Consider different types of cardio, particularly non-impact.
- Try not to increase your total weekly mileage by more than 10% each week.
- Try and have a mixture of low, medium and high intensity days/sessions. More low/medium than high intensity sessions.
- Spread your runs throughout the week with adequate rest periods. Try not to do two high intensity sessions back to back.
- For example, Monday: HIIT session, short run, Tuesday: Rest Wednesday: run focusing on speed, Upper body S&C, Thursday: cycling/low impact workout, Friday: Long run, Saturday: Rest, Sunday: Lower body S&C, cardio/low impact workout.
3. Improve the tissue load capacity
In order to help our bodies adapt to our training, we need to improve the following;
- Strength: Include strength and conditioning sessions
- Flexibility and Mobility: Working on range of movement at our joints, improve muscle tone and increase muscle length with stretching, mobility work and eccentric exercises. Foam rolling can also help reduce muscle tension and pain in the short term.
- Improve control of your body movements. This will come with practice and strengthening and refers to the ability to move correctly and avoid compensatory movements.
- Time: we need to give ourselves time to physically recover and adapt. We also need to take our time with increasing our training load, gradually increasing reps, sets miles etc.
4. Rest and recovery
Rest is crucial for recovery and performance! You can’t run every day and expect to get better. Your muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones need time to physically adapt to the loads it has been put under, allowing us to get stronger. This process doesn’t happen during our lunch break. For example, tendons can take between 24-36 hours to recover from exercise.
You also need to consider other areas that may affect our recovery such as having a good nutrition that meets your needs, sleep (minimum of 8 hours per night) and managing stress levels.
Hopefully these tips will help you enjoy exercise in isolation without getting injured. Any questions, drop me an email and I will be happy to help.
Happy training,
Stay Safe!
Jodie
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