Can I run every day on an Alter G Treadmill? Well, that’s what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
I got a great question from a runner who wanted to start running on an Alter G Treadmill, and what she said was that, “I’ve been getting out of the boot. I started running on an Alter G Treadmill, and everything’s been going great. I feel good. I feel like a million bucks because I’m finally moving again. Is it okay for me to run every day?”
When you think about this, I want you to think about this from a little bit different perspective. Don’t think about it as you returning to running, because your brain is always going to be calibrated to the fitness that you had prior to your injury or early in your injury, not after you’ve been spending weeks in a fracture walking boot.
Think about this from this perspective instead. What if you had a friend who came to you who was not fit at all, who wanted to run a marathon, wanted to do their very first marathon, and you were going to help them train? Would you tell them to run every single day? Chances are good the answer to that would be no, because you know you have to rest and recover and make sure you don’t get injured. If you take someone who has never, ever run before and they start ramping up for a marathon at the same schedule you would use to ramp up for a marathon, they’re definitely going to get injured.
If you ramp up and you’re running on back to back days, you’re probably going to make a big mistake because you have to remember your goals. You have your overall goal of getting back to running, you have your specific goal of competing on race day, but your goal when you’re getting out of the boot is really, first and foremost, how you get your strength back, how you get your flexibility back, how you get your coordination back, and you have to test to make sure that every next increase in force applied to the injured tissue when you’re running is safe. So if you’re running every day, this is probably the worst way to do that. When you’re running ahead of schedule, faster than, let’s say, your doctor maybe told you you should, which is often the case, and you’re going faster than the standard treatment regimens that you read about that are designed for average patients who aren’t runners, every run is a test and you cannot test every single day.
I always say, “You really need to think about how it feels when you’re running, you have to think about how it feels the next evening, and you have to think about how it feels during the day the next day to really assess whether or not that specific run was safe for you.” And if you just go get on the Alter G Treadmill again, you go run again, how are you going to test it? You don’t really know. First of all, you’re going to feel good because you’re running, and I understand you want to run, but there is nothing worse than talking to an injured runner who actually started to ramp up, started returning to running, went a little too fast, and didn’t test appropriately along the way and got re-injured. That is incredibly demoralizing, and you have to avoid that.
This process that I’m talking about is the exact same thing that I teach in the Fast Track Challenge. It’s not rocket science, but it is systematic, and you have to do it a certain way if you really want to move as fast as possible from injury to recovery and then back to running. So think about it in terms of that. And if you want to run every day on the Alter G Treadmill, do whatever you want. Don’t tell somebody that I told you to do it, but just remember, you can do whatever you want as long as you’re willing to pay the consequences.
If you enjoyed this training, please like it, please share it, and I’ll see you in the next training.
