If you’re a runner, imagine your body is like a fortress. Every day you are under siege by a litany of foes trying to break down your defences and penetrate your walls. When your enemies break through they will ransack the city and you know what that means, running injury. Whether you get injured or not depends on two things:
- The strength of your fortress.
- The strength of the invading attackers.
When we develop a running injury, we usually only consider how much running we have been doing in order to help us understand why we got injured. However, your fortress can be weakened by many different things. When our fortress is in a weakened state, a running injury is more likely.
We’re going to talk about how to build a big strong fortress so that you can avoid running injuries. Your enemy is very cunning. Those attacking your fortress take many different forms, some that you may not have expected. Read on to learn the 10 ways you can build a stronger fortress to help you avoid running injuries.
Fortress vs. Attackers
In the image I’ve depicted some of the attackers we face. The attackers are assaulting your fortress and trying to cause an injury. On the left you can see all of the things we can do to fortify the fortress, making it big and strong so that it can withstand the attacks. If your fortress is stronger that the attacking forces, you will not get injured.
1 Fitness vs. Deconditioning
When you have a high level of cardiorespiratory fitness your metabolism is stronger. When tissues (muscles, tendons, bones) are loaded you can mobilize your cells to repair and reinforce the area quickly and efficiently. By contrast, if you are less physically fit your metabolic response to the loads that running places on your tissues will be slower. If your cells can’t repair and reinforce areas under load quickly enough then an injury will occur.
Maintaining a high level of cardiorespiratory fitness year-round is essential to minimizing your risk of injury as your training increases.
2 Long Term vs Short Term Training Load
Training load refers to any load you place on your body. When you run you hit the ground as you land on one foot. This loads the tissues of the leg that you are landing on. When you go for a run you repeat this over and over again for the duration of the run. Afterwards your body will respond to that load by making the tissues that you loaded stronger and more resilient. However, if the load place on the tissues is higher than they are strong enough to tolerate then you will develop an injury.
In this way, loading your tissues through training is a double edged sword. On the one hand you risk injury as you may load your tissues too much. On the other hand, loading the tissues will ask them to adapt and become stronger. Then they can tolerate more load in the future. The goal is to always load the tissues the right amount, not too much and not too little. I call this “just right” amount the adaptive zone.
Tissues that are loaded in the adaptive zone over and over for years and years get progressively stronger and more resilient. That’s why some runners can run more than 200km per week without getting injured. They have a very high long-term training load. This high long-term training load gives them protection against injury.
A high short-term training load is an injury risk. Take the example of a 26km training run. An experienced runner who had averaged 60km per week for the last 12 months would likely not get injured on a 26km run. On the other hand, a beginner runner who had only averaged 10km per week is much more likely to get injured by a 26km run. For the more experienced runner the short-term training load (26km) is not very high compared to their long-term training load (60km per week for 12 months). For the beginner, the short-term training load (26km) is really high compared to their long-term training load (10km per week for only 3 months).
As you can see, a high long-term training load is protective against injury from a high short-term training load. So the take home here is, if you want a strong fortress, keep your long-term training load high. For those of us in Ottawa, that means don’t drop your mileage right down in the winter! Keep relatively high weekly mileage year-round.
3 Optimum Nutrition vs Malnutrition
Without food, humans can last about 1-2 months at the most. That means we have to be constantly rebuilding our body in order to survive. What it build “you” out of depends entirely on what you eat. As the saying goes, you are what you eat. If you want to build a strong injury-resistant fortress, you need to give your builders good materials. Asking your body to make strong muscles, tendons and bones out of bagels and pizza is like asking your builders to make an impenetrable fortress out of drywall. It’s not going to happen.
Now, I’m not a nutritionist or dietician, so let’s just go with common sense. We know greens, vegetable and fresh fruit are good for us. We know fast food and other processed foods are bad. Use your common sense and give your builders the material they need to make a strong fortress. If anyone wants to learn more about nutrition I just finished a fantastic book called Eat to Live and I would recommend starting there.
4 Sleep vs Fatigue
Does anyone actually feel like they get enough sleep? I ask every single one of my clients how much sleep they get and how they feel when they wake up. The standard answer is that they get 5-6 hours and they feel knackered when they get up.
Sleep is when the builders come out to repair the fortress after the day’s battle. The builders need time to do their work. If you wake yourself up using an alarm clock before they have time to finish their work you are going to have holes in your defences. That’s fatigue. Most people these days live in a state of perpetual fatigue. It’s become so familiar it feels normal and they have no recollection of what it felt like to get a full night’s sleep for two full weeks straight.
On a side rant here, I think this starts in our teenage years. Teenagers need way more sleep than adults. For some reason we think babies who sleep a lot are awesome and teenagers who sleep a lot are lazy. If you have teenage kids, let them sleep as much as they need to. If they stay up too late playing on the computer, set a good example. Which brings me to my next point.
Go to bed earlier.
Everyone says the same thing “I have to get up early to … {insert task here} “. The reality is, nobody has control over what time they get up. Almost everybody has control over what time they go to sleep. Turn off the TV, ipad, laptop, phone or whatever other device you are using to keep yourself overstimulated, and go to sleep. If you would like to learn more about the importance of sleep, I would recommend reading The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington.
5 Mindfulness vs Stress
Stress is a big one. In terms of our enemies, stress is a death squadron of elite commando soldiers. Persistent psychological stress weakens our bodies ability to repair and reinforce itself. I have no easy answers when it comes to stress. It is a problem very specific to the individual. However, I do recommend everyone try some form of mindfulness training for a couple of months to see if it works for you.
Mindfulness is just paying attention to the present moment as opposed to thinking about the future or the past. It can also be called meditation or relaxation. It takes many forms but it is all based around the same physiological principle – reducing the activity of the fight or flight system (sympathetic system) and increasing the activity of the rest and digest system (parasympathetic system). This is too big a topic to unpack here but let’s just say that persistent stress leads to us living in a constant state of on-edge fight or flight. That means we don’t come down and relax in the rest and digest zone. It’s in the rest and digest zone that the body repairs and reinforces itself. If you are a runner that lives most of your life in the rest and digest zone, you can build a stronger fortress.
If you are interested in learning more about mindfulness there are a million resources online. A couple of apps I have used and would recommend are Headspace and Calm. For more information about how stress can affect our health and our lives I would recommend the wonderful book Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky.
6 Recovery vs Overtraining
Overtraining is when we put too much physiological stress on our body through training. It is actually very rare in recreational runners and more of a problem for elite runners, or at least recreational runners who train at a very high intensity (think more than one workout a day, every day). Most of us recreational runners are unlikely to suffer from overtraining. However, we do need to make sure we have enough recovery time between intense training sessions. Again, recovery time (or relative rest) is when the builders come out to reinforce the fortress. If we don’t give them time to do their work, they will do a crappy job. This leaves our fortress weakened and leaves us more susceptible to injury.
As a general rule, at least every fourth week of your training should be at a lower intensity. You will see this in the structure of most race training programs. You should also place recovery days after your more intense training days like the long run or hill session. On the recovery day you can do a slow run or some cross training if you are in very good condition. If you are still building up to that level then use your recovery days to prepare excellent meals, get lots of sleep and enjoy some time with your family.
7 Optimum Technique vs Suboptimal Technique
Running with optimum technique will distribute the loads placed on your tissues throughout your body. When running with optimum technique you will also reduce your impact forces, which means the loads on the body are lighter. Running in this way allows you to log more miles and train at higher intensity without injury. When you run with suboptimal technique you will inadvertently place more of the load on a focussed part of your body. This means the tissues in that area have to adapt to an unfair share of the load and can put them at higher risk for injury. A common example is to overstride and land hard on your heel way out in front of your centre of mass. This will reduce the load on your feet, but the load has to go somewhere. The knees have to absorb more load as the feet are getting a free ride. This means your knees are more likely to get injured.
Working on your running technique will help you build a stronger fortress and help you prevent injuries. If you would like to learn more about improving your running technique, checkout my articles on running cadence and running technique.
If you are worried about your running technique and live here in Ottawa, why not come in for a Free Running Technique Analysis?
8 Health vs Illness
This is an obvious one but it is often overlooked. When you are ill your fortress is under attack from other forces. It’s like the enemy called for reinforcements and they’re conducting an intense siege. Now is the time to rest and concentrate on fortifying your fortress through proper nutrition, sleep, mindfulness etc. Now is not the time to increase your training. If you get ill during a training cycle, be smart. Allow yourself to fully recover and then ease back into your training. You are at a higher risk of injury when you are ill.
9 Happiness vs Depression
Our state of mind has a huge impact on our physical health. We all know this intuitively but we sometimes need to pay closer attention to it. If you are having trouble with depression or other mood disorders it’s like your fortress is staffed with unmotivated workers. They have trouble mobilizing themselves to repair and reinforce the defenses and that leaves you more vulnerable to injury. By contrast, when you feel content, happy and fulfilled, your staff are raring to go. They can’t wait to get up each day and get to work making you stronger and more resilient.
Depression and other mood disorders are a serious business and a widespread problem. If you have not had trouble with these things then I’m sure you know someone who has. I don’t mean to trivialize these very real health concerns here. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that these things can have a very real impact on our running. On the flip side, aerobic exercise has been shown to be very helpful in treating depression.
10 Youth vs Aging
As much as I hate to write this one, it is true. The workers in our fortress are more motivated, efficient and numerous when we are younger. We heal far quicker from injury and we are more resistant to developing an injury due to a very strong metabolism. As we age the workers are not as able to repair and reinforce the fortress quite so quickly.
That being said, we use our age as an excuse far too often. I hear it every day in the clinic: “I guess I’m just getting old”. Look at all the other things on this list that influence the strength of our fortress and increase our chances of getting injured! Our age is literally the only thing on this list that we can’t do anything about, so why focus on that?
The reality is that if you have developed an injury your age is probably a minor factor when taken in the context of everything else I have mentioned above. Until the day you die you are always able to build a stronger and more resilient fortress. You never lose that ability, it’s just not as quick. If you need more convincing, read about the Australian couple in their 60’s who ran a marathon every day for a year to get all the way around Australia! (Also, they did it on a whole food raw vegan diet, which speaks again to my point about nutrition.)
In Conclusion
There are many forces attacking our fortress every day. All of them can weaken our defenses and make us more likely to develop an injury. It’s not just about miles per week. When trying to avoid running injuries, be sure to consider all the ways in which you can build a strong fortress.
Have you had trouble with recurring injuries? Have you found an unconventional way to reduce your injuries? Let us know in the comments.
To learn more about injuries and injury prevention from the source, check out our Facebook Live video below!