Injuries. Often times these little things called injuries, a.k.a. aches and pains in the body, can cause runners/athletes to be sidelined for days, even weeks or months, if not tended to right away. Worse case scenario, if not remedied immediately, can cause you to have surgery or permanently give up on running.
There are quite a few of you who have asked me about running injuries, or any type of ache/pain you have experienced as a result of a running routine you may be embracing.
There are many reasons for this happening and is fairly normal due to the impact of the training, life stressors, daily choices, and imbalances showing up in your body just now after possibly weeks of feeling so great!
Shin splints and Runner’s Knee, which are the top two most typical overuse injuries (amongst others) that shows up in training if your body is dysfunctional (imbalanced) in some way; mostly in the lower extremity anywhere from the core region on down.
This article can help you with that pain, if you have it, however here are some other KEY tips that can help you identify for sure where you source for the symptoms are. Runner’s Knee/shin splints are symptoms and not the cause of your pain. Keep that one in mind. If you train smart and follow a few or all of these following steps, you will not be sidelined from an injury (unless, of course, your injury has been assessed by a professional doctor that may think you have something more serious)
1. Talk to me, or another running expert, about your pain as soon as you get/have something noticeably different going on when you run. If you don’t talk to someone immediately, we cannot help you, and your injury may only get worse.
2. Depending on the level of the pain, you will want to see a professional doctor, physical therapist, or chiropractor right away to officially pinpoint the cause. Make sure that the doctor works on runners either exclusively or as a majority of their practice and/or are runners themselves. Get a referral or check their credentials. If they don’t work with runners or are not runners themselves, I would be a bit uncertain as to their response to healing the injury/source of the pain. They love having patients, so their bias may come from a different mindset if they don’t run or have not worked with runners a lot. Trust me, as I have been there before!
3. Get a massage and/or see a chiropractor—both can bring healing and alignment to your body.
4. Make sure you are doing your core strengthening exercises. Talk to me or a runner specific personal trainer that knows what helps balance your body and makes you more functional as you pound the pavement.
5. Avoid speed work/intervals, steep hills, tempo work, long runs of six miles or more and running on concrete at all costs until the pain is back to a 0 on the pain scale. In other words, if you have NO pain, you are at a zero on the pain scale of 0 to 10.
6. No running allowed if you have a pain level of three or greater on a scale of ten, with ten being a debilitating pain that doesn’t even allow you to walk. Cross training will be your friend, such as spinning, swimming, elliptical, and running in a deep-water pool. I can give you formulas on all of these to equate the amount of running you would be doing. As long as you can do these things with little to no pain, you can very likely not lose any fitness level even though you are not running. I have done this several times and have always started/finished a race even if an injury came as close as two weeks from race time.
