Today on the Doc On The Run podcast, we’re talking about how stress reduction is critical during coronavirus lockdown downtime for runners.
I listen to lots of podcasts and I recently have heard lots of other speakers in all genres talking about how important it is to stay healthy and avoid illness, and reduce your risks or contracting Covid-19.
All of these people are right. Now, more than ever it is important to maximize your immune system.
In thinking about that, I realized that all of these same strategies people are talking about to help you avoid a viral illness can also help you heal from training, prevent over training and maximize recovery after hard workouts.
If your training and you want to avoid illness that’s doubly important.
Right now, all of this would be well served by staying as healthy as possible. But in addition, if you’ve been struggling with an over training injury this might be your golden opportunity to heal seriously. And know how to shift your recovery process in the high gear in preparation for your return to hard training and racing.
This is the time to do a deep dive into your recovery limiters. Sleep, nutrition, stress management,
All overtraining running injuries are stress injuries.
Its called a stress fracture for a reason. All forms of tendinitis, muscle strains and other soft tissue injuries that happen as a consequence of overtraining only happen because you apply too much stress to one particular piece of tissue before I can fully recover before your next workout. But all of that stress is by mechanical stress.
When I lecture at medical conferences about overtraining injuries I discuss 12 different forms of stress that affect your body, reduce your immune system and can impede the healing process and delay your recovery from hard workouts and overtraining injuries. If you reduce the other forms of stress, that allows you to train harder before you reach that breaking point.
If you’re sitting around now trying to figure out what to do since you can’t go to the gym, you can’t run at your local park because it’s close, this may be a great time to further assess what you’re doing in your recovery process the can help you stay fit when you’re training hard.
Keep distance safe from those exercising stay safe. Everyone’s talking about the 3 foot rule, but if you’re all breathing hard, you maybe more risk and making more distance. Don’t underestimate the risk of running with others. Do everything you can to decrease the spread of the virus.
Spread risk for overusing certain tissues while you are under lockdown. If you have a treadmill or an elliptical trainer at home, that’s great but don’t overdo it on one piece of equipment. Don’t just run, run, run on a treadmill. Do core work, try some new body weight exercises that you’ve never done before, cross train your tail off get stronger all over.
Use this time wisely and you can develop new strategies to carry you into a stronger runner season when the coronavirus cloud passes. Focus on stress reduction, now.
And don’t ever forget, running is only one form of stress. Running is biomechanical stress. But there’re many other forms of stress that influence your capacity to absorb injury and fight off illness.
I’ve created a free worksheet for you to help you assess the 12 forms of stress that can slow a runners recovery and frankly I think also make you more susceptible to contracting an illness or potentially even suffering a more severe illness once contracted. Go to DocOnTheRun.com. You can go to the show notes for this particular episode and download it. It will help you work through a series of questions to ask yourself if you want to the overall amount of stress in your system that can help you recover faster after runs and hard workouts.