Today on the doc on the Run podcast, we’re talking about half boot versus half weight when you’re recovering from a running injury.
The half-ass boot routine is no good. Slow improvement with unnecessarily increased risk of atrophy, weakness, stiffness, loss of neuromuscular connections, and destruction of your running form. Your running form, your strength, your flexibility, allprotect you from another overtraining injury.
When you wear a fracture walking boot for a long time inconsistently, or a long time walking on it, you’re going to get more of those bad things.
The other thing that is good, the sort of polar opposite of that, is a half-ass weight routine.
Why would that be good?
Well, what you get is the benefit of starting to move and loosen things up, restore neuromuscular connections, regain and rebuild some of your running fitness with significantly lower risk. What do I mean by that?
Let’s talk about the half ass-boot routine. This is what most doctors do. They don’t want to put you on crutches. They don’t want to make life inconvenient for you. They don’t want to get a bad review online. So what do they do? They’d say, “Okay, here’s your boot. It’s not that bad. I don’t see a crack on the x ray. It’s a minor sprain. It’s a little bit of tendinitis,” something vague.
And then they tell you, “Use the boot as much as you can or whenever you really need to.”
What in the world does that mean?
You don’t really know either, so you use the boot…some.
But you’re walking around to the bathroom without the boot. You get out of bed and you go make coffee without the boot. You wear the boot only when you go out for what you think, or maybe long walks and or going to work.
But you’re not wearing it all the time, so you’re not getting the full benefit of the immobilization that actually lets the thing heal quickly. That’s not good. The longer you do that, the worse you are anyway. You’re just getting more and more atrophy and you’re delaying your return to running because it’s taking longer for you to actually recover.
Instead of doing this half assed routine with the boot, a halfway routine is better.
What I mean by that is that when you’re starting to do workouts, initially, you’re not applying the full force of your body weight to that injured foot, that injured part. That stress fracture, the plantar plate, the tendon, whatever it is.
You could also do a thing like using the lever system or the Alter-G treadmill, something that can decrease the amount of force going through those structures so that you can ramp up and spend more time on your feet with significantly lower stress and strain to that one injured thing that messed you up.
That is really the name of the game.
You have to make sure that you let it heal as fast as possible, maintain as much as your running fitness as possible, and restore your running fitness, your running form, and your running specific strength to get back to running as quickly as possible. That’s really the key.
Half-ass boot routine is no good.
Half-assed weight routine is really good.
So learn how to do that.
Learn how to apply it to your situation, and get back to running a whole lot faster.
If you’re not sure what to do and you want to get on a strategy, call with me. You can book a ten minute strategy call with me by going to docontherun.com click on the tab that says “Talk to the Expert,” and you can block my calendar for a ten minute strategy call to figure out what you’ve been missing in your return to running journey after your overtraining injury. So go book the call and I’ll talk to you there.
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