Today on the doc on the Run podcast, we’re talking about kettlebell mistakes and modifications for injured runners.
If you’re a runner who likes to do weight training, one of the things you might use at home would be kettlebells. Kettlebells can be really helpful to maintain a lot of strength, not just in your feet, not just in your legs, but your entire body.
A couple of things to keep in mind. Less weight, less reps. And if you do that, the form is protective. But swinging to the point where you have your heels popping up off the ground dramatically increases the load on the forefoot, specifically, to things like the plantar plate ligament or the end of the metatarsal, where you might have a metatarsal stress reaction or even a metatarsal stress fracture.
It’s really hard to remember that lower weight with movement reproducing your the same sort of movements that you would do in your typical workout with those weights would facilitate any of the physiologic process that will help you stay fit and injury proof, but by lowering your weight, it use it on the kettlebell specifically.
So if you drop down by 30 or 40 or 50%, lowering the weight on those kettlebells will help you maintain your fitness, because it will help you maintain the coordination of those neuromuscular units that have to fire in unison in a coordinated fashion, so that you can actually maintain the sort of muscle memory, if you will, that helps you maintain good running form.
And when you have good running form, that decreases all of the peak loading or the forces applied to those structures that could become overloaded in an overtraining injury.
Rather than going with an all or nothing approach, thinking, “should I do kettlebells or not do kettlebells,” it may be worth considering do the same kind of workout with just a little bit less reps, so that you don’t get to failure at the end, where your heels start popping off the ground to try to compensate for you fatiguing. Do a little bit lighter weight just to keep your entire system better tuned.
The reason I’m doing this episode is there is a runner I’ve been working with who was doing really, really well and he sent me videos of his actual kettlebell workout, and I noticed that he was really coming up on his toes at the end of the swings when he was doing these weights.
While were reviewing his videos over webcam, I said, “If you if you look at the videos, in every single sequence, you’re doing great at the beginning and your heels are on the floor. But at the end of each set, as you start to tire, you’re using your feet to crank up and pull your heels all the way up to the ground to keep the motion of the kettlebell swinging. “
If you decrease the reps a little bit, you decrease the weight a little bit. It keeps your feet flat on the floor. You don’t wind up with that propulsion at the end. That could overload those stresses in the forefoot. Those higher forces could make a stress fracture or a plantar plate sprain or something like that even worse. This applies to all kinds of workouts that you could do to maintain your running fitness.
When you’re injured, you really want to try to make sure that you decrease those peak forces that can be applied to your one injured thing, so you can get back to running as quickly as possible.
If you like this episode, please like it, please subscribe. And if you’re confused about what to do and you don’t really know what to do next, you can get on a ten minute strategy call where we try to figure out what pieces you’re missing. If you want to do that, go to docontherun.com, click on the Talk To The Expert tab, and you can block my calendar for a ten minute strategy call there.
«« #1011 Which weekday is best to add workouts for injured runners | #1013 Worst thing about walk run routine after running injury »» |