Today on the Doc On The Run Podcast we’re talking about why runners need to flirt with overtraining injury.
In this episode, we’re talking about over-training and why you as a runner should actually be flirting with disaster and getting as close as possible to over-training. So here’s the deal. If you hire a coach, what do you think your coach’s job is? Do you think it’s your coach’s job to figure out how to change your running form? Just to give you a schedule of activities, to give you a list of things to do every day, to teach you how to tie your shoes? I mean, what do you think the coach’s job really is? Because the coach’s job, I will tell you, if you have a goal and your goal is to run a marathon as fast as possible, your coach has a couple of jobs.
The first one is to figure out how fast you can run now, and then what you can do to increase your fitness, your aerobic capacity, your strength, your speed, everything that’s going to get you to your physiologic capacity for speed. Now, what that means is that your coach is going to design a program that is going to actually test you physically and mentally, and push you to your physiologic limits on a regular basis to make you stronger. So they’ll give you a series of workouts to do, and then you have to go execute. And when you do those, if you do them correctly and if your coach is right about where you are when you start and where you are as you progress and check in, then what happens is that you do the maximum amount of tissue damage that your body can sustain and rebuild before your next workout.
Now, if you mess up, if you get sick or you change the schedule around without telling your coach, or you get the flu and then go do your long run anyway, you do something that taxes your system that your coach doesn’t know about, then you get an over-training injury. So that’s what happens is that when you get an over-training injury, the only thing that happened is that you did not recover sufficiently before you got the over-training injury.
But if you want to get faster, if you want to get stronger, you are always hovering just beneath your threshold for injury. Now the same is true with recovery. If you really want to recover as fast as possible, you need to flirt with that line. You need to basically keep increasing your activity to match the ever increasing strength in the tissue if you want to get back to running and training as quickly as possible. Waiting is not a plan and waiting is not the way to execute that.
So if you want to know how to do that, I created something for you, it’s a free training, you’ll find it very useful. I promise it’s free. If you don’t like it, I’ll refund your money. But it is three days where you just give me one hour for three days in a row, and I’ll show you how to really figure out where you are right now. How to reduce the numbers that you basically may have falsely elevated right now, so you can have your true baseline and use those numbers to make progress, and see if something is safe for you or not. I just finished a call with a runner who is trying to figure out whether or not the activities that she’s doing are safe, but she has several days of numbers to follow and she’s going to add activities and know that it’s safe to do those in a very specific way.
So I’ll show you how to do that. And then the third day, I actually show you how to reduce the stress on the injured tissue to help you recalculate those numbers so that you can actually continue to ramp up and maintain your fitness better. The goal is not to do no activity, the goal is to do lots of activity with a lot less stress on the injured tissue.
And if you do those things, you will get back to training in record time, but it’s a lot like training. You have to flirt with disaster sometimes if you want to get as strong as possible, but you have to be thoughtful, you have to be careful, and what you do has to make sense physiologically. So go sign up, check out the challenge. I’ll see you there.
If you think you have a nagging injury, and you are trying to figure out whether or not you can run, you need to check out How to Fast-Track Your Running Injury in Record Time!
Give me 3 days, and I’ll help you figure out where you are are now, and how you can get back to running in record time. Get started for free right now!
Go grab your seat now. I’ll see you in the training.
