Our Top 3 ways to Reduce Your Risk of Injury

Load management

Physiotherapist Marc See and Coach Ben Green attended the Calgary International Running Symposium in 2014 where our favourite take home message was a quote from Craig Payne: “The 3 main causes of overuse running injuries are: training errors, training errors and training errors.”
Following this idea the best way to prevent most errors in training is to do the right things as often as you can – a fairly hard task for most enthusiastic runners. Making the process easier is the main role of a coach. Having an objective macro overview of your training, including periodisation, slowly increasing the load across the year, weighing the intensity to ensure you do enough to move forwards but not too much that you break… this is the job of a coach: load management! You can get a good program from an app but it is difficult to discuss with the app what to do if you go on holiday, or get the flu, or start getting sore because you’ve over-extended yourself.

An example year would be below. The overall load you can sustain per week will improve across the year. After each goal, there are periods of rest and recovery, but no complete drop in training though. There can also be other races in the year but they may not be the main focus of the training program and will be factored in to keep the overall load consistent (as if they were another solid training session with possible more recovery needed). What you want to avoid is erratic training with really big weeks followed by troughs because you were sore, injured or just got busy with life. Running is a long-play game. It rewards consistency.

Marc 1

 

Strength Circuit 

Strength and conditioning is an area of training often missed by most runners. Studies have shown little impact on injuries with prophylactic stretching (a course of general stretches to target all the main groups in the hope of reducing injury). However, with a generalised strength routine there IS a protective factor. As a gross generalisation, stronger runners will get injured less compared to flexible runners.
Implementing a 30min basic routine into your training regime 2-3 times per week will build your resilience to injury and possibly even help your performance.

Check out our YouTube channel (search “Front Runner Sports” or click here) for ideas of exercises but ALWAYS get an individual program tailored to your level and requirements to help reduce your risk of self-induced injury.

 

Variety

“Training variability needs to exceed natural movement variation.” This is one of the key points our Coaching Manager Ben Green tries to employ to help reduce injury. If you do the same 5km jog around your block, 3 times per week at the same pace, your body will get very good at doing that one thing (this is the crux of training specificity). It will also load the same tissues the same way and leave others less stimulated. Over use injuries are so called because the tissue is gradually loaded past it’s physiological limits. If given time the tissue will adapt to the imposed load and strengthen (this is the whole point of any physical training), if not given sufficient time, it will succumb to the loading under fatigue and fail.
Hammering one area by doing monotonous training will lead to a steep overload/adaptation curve. Varying your training will switch which areas are loaded and what you are stressing or strengthening. You can vary your training by distance, intensity, footwear, terrain or even the time of day sometimes can be enough of an alteration to the norm.

 

Marc 2

Hypothetical “Calf load” for different running sessions

We trust you now have a greater understanding as to how you can reduce your risk of injury as you build up toward your goals for 2016! If you wish to know more about this topic, or anything to do with your running training, please get in touch with our expert physiotherapy and coaching team who are ready to assist you towards your next running goal! Please email physio@frontrunnersports.com.au OR coach@frontrunnersports.com.au or see our website: www.frontrunnersports.com.au

 

Running Regards,

Team Front Runner