Today on the Doc On The Run podcast we’re talking about the slippery slope of running injury recovery.
Before we get started in this episode I just want to let you know I created something for you that I think you might find really useful. It’s a presentation sharing the three main secrets I have discovered that are used by injured runners so they can maintain their running fitness and still recover from any over-training injury. Even if it’s a stress fracture, a plantar plate tear, a partial rupture of the plantar facia or Achilles Tendinitis.. this will help you get up and get moving!
So if you’ve been told you have to sit on the couch and wait for an x-ray or for something to change, you need to check this out.
I’ll explain more at the end of the episode. And let’s queue up the theme song and get started with today’s show.
Now, if you get a running injury it’s always bad. Nobody is ever happy to have a stress fracture or to have plantar fasciitis or Achilles tendonitis or something worse.
If you get an injury and you’re trying to recover, what I see as the biggest problem with most runners is that they half do the recovery. They basically stop recovering, really aggressively. They basically stop working out, aggressively. They sit around and they’re waiting and waiting and waiting to heal. They get an X-ray and the doctor says, “Stop everything. Don’t run. Don’t do anything, just relax. Come back in four weeks and we’ll take another X-ray,” and you’re left kind of scratching your head saying, “Well, I don’t get it. You just said you didn’t see a crack. Why do I have to wait for four weeks and do nothing?” and what do you do? You’re confused.
It doesn’t make sense but you wait four weeks and do nothing because you’re a good patient. And then you lose all your fitness. You start to get weaker. You start to get stiffer. You start to lose all your neuromuscular connections, your coordination degenerates, and you start to get weakness in the bones and lack of pliability in the tendons and all that stuff predisposes you to re-injury later.
So, if you’ve been injured and you get a little bit better, a little bit worse, you start to realize that you kind of have this very slow decline of fitness that isn’t really killing you per se but it can become persistent and it becomes progressively worse the longer you do that halfway routine. You just get weaker, you know that you’re weaker. You start to get winded when you go upstairs. You’re doing shorter runs. You’re doing slower runs. You’re not really doing your speed work as fast as you used to and you’re not doing as many of the repeats you used to do. You’re not doing your long runs as long as you want to and all that intermittent time off starts to add up and conspire to really destroy the base fitness that you worked so hard to get.
The good news is that you don’t just have to do that. That is not the only plan. That may be the conventional plan and that may be what you’ve been fed as the best advice but that’s a really short answer for a really complicated problem.
A better routine is to try to work hard to maintain your running fitness while you take stress off of that one injured part, the one thing that’s actually beaten up, and strengthen everything else that supports that one little injured part.
If you do that, you can maintain your running fitness while you’re recovering and then when you get back to running you can be at a much better place where you get back to running a whole lot faster. And that is really the key.
At the beginning this episode I told you that I have created a presentation that you really need to see if you are injured and are trying to figure out what to do next. You’re going to find really useful if you have an overtraining injury and you are told that the key is to sit still, rest, recover and, in short…do nothing other than watch your fitness evaporate.
It doesn’t have to be that way. I will show you 3 Secrets to Overtraining Recovery that injured runners use to maintain their running fitness and still recover from any overtraining injury. You can use the presentation get moving, maintain your hard-earned running fitness and get past any overtraining injury.
Registration is free just go to docontherun.com/overtrainingsecrets and sign up there.
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