What are the three steps you need to take if you want to start running with a stress fracture? Well, that is what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run Podcast.
There really are three steps that I figured out that you need to do if you really have a stress fracture but need to start running. Step one is to figure out how bad the stress fracture is right now.
It sounds pretty obvious, and many times I get people calling me or asking me questions about if they can run with a grade two or a grade three stress fracture, but many times they do not even understand what that means, and they have not actually figured out how bad the stress fracture is right now.
If you called me and you said, “I have a grade two stress fracture, can you run?” I would say, “I do not know, I need to ask you a bunch of questions, and we need to figure out how severe it is, how bad it is right now, so that we can make a plan together for you to recover as quickly as possible and start running.”
But that is based on information that you have yourself right now, not based on some classification that you don’t even understand, and you don’t even know which classification scheme it is. And as soon as you know how severe it is, step two is really simple. You carefully reduce the stress and strain on that one bone that has the stress fracture.
Remember, if you got 26 bones in your feet, you have one metatarsal that has an injury, you have 25 bones that can absorb stress if you move that stress to those other bones, but your entire body is not broken. You don’t just have to stop running, you just have to reduce the stress and strain on that one injured bone that has a stress fracture so that you can start exercising and running as quickly as possible.
You also have to reduce the stress and strain so that the stress fracture itself in that one bone can heal as fast as possible. As soon as you’ve done that, you’ve figured out the severity, figured out how you’re going to track the severity, you’ve come up with a plan to actually reduce the stress and strain on that one injured bone.
Step three is to start training and testing so that you can maintain and rebuild your running fitness. You need to do this systematically. The way that you do that is that you take the severity that you figured out in step one, and you monitor it. If the severity gets less, your pain goes down, the swelling goes down, the bruising goes down, all the things that you can actually figure out yourself, and then you’re exercising and rebuilding your running fitness, and the stress does not go up, the discomfort does not go up, the pain does not go up, well then, presumably, it’s safe for you to do that, right?
But you have to make sure that you’re testing so that you can run without re-injury. So, what does that mean? How would I do this? Well, I figured out all of these things, but for more than a decade, I’ve been working only with injured runners, doing second opinions, and what I would do is really simple. If you think you have a stress fracture, or you’ve been told you have a stress fracture, or if you’ve been told that you just can’t run and you’re supposed to wait, and because of that, you think you’re losing all your running fitness, and you know that you’re getting weaker and stiffer, if you feel like you’ve been trapped in a fractured walking boot, waiting for some mythical four-week or six-week magic time, and then you can suddenly run, well, I’ve got a secret. You can still work out, whether you have a doctor or not. For the last year, like I said, I’ve been keeping really careful notes on how I understood every runner with a stress fracture and figured out the severity of their injury so that I could help them start working out immediately.
During that course of talking to all these athletes and taking all these notes and figuring out what to do, well, I figured out what they’re always missing, and they’re always missing the same thing every single time. Every time somebody signs up for a second opinion, I see them online, I talk to them on the phone, they’re always missing the same thing.
Hint number one, the severity of your injury has absolutely nothing to do with your X-ray, nothing. That is true if you have a stress fracture. It’s not true if you dropped an engine block on your foot and you broke the metatarsal. That is completely different. That is not a stress fracture. That has to do with whether or not you need surgery to repair it if you have trauma. That is different.
If you have a stress fracture, the bone’s in the right place, it’s inflamed and irritated, has nothing to do with what it looks like on an X-ray. And if you do have a stress fracture and you went and got an MRI and somebody said, well, you have this signal change on your MRI that suggests you have a stress fracture, therefore you have a stress fracture, the severity of your injury, the way that I figured out, has absolutely nothing to do with an MRI at all.
Hint number three, it has nothing to do with how long ago you stopped running. So, I have another episode I’m going to be recording where somebody said, I got injured, I had a stress fracture for 11 months and it’s still not better. Has nothing to do with how long ago you stopped running. It has everything to do with what you’re monitoring and what you’re doing.
That is the difference. It has nothing to do with how long you’ve been wearing a boot. I don’t care if you’ve been in a boot for two weeks, six weeks, or three months. It has nothing to do with that. You can figure out the severity and you can stop wearing the boot, usually a whole lot sooner if you understand the severity of your injury and you can also figure out when to start working out.
The way that you do that is the same way that I’ve done with all these athletes. I created a two-page worksheet for you that you can get for free if you go to www.stressfracturesecrets.com. And you can get that worksheet for free right now that will walk you through the exact same questions I would ask you if you signed up for a second opinion webcam consultation with me.
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