Today on the doc on the Run podcast, we’re talking about the worst thing about walk run routine after running injury.
I really don’t like the routine where you’re going back to activity, you’re trying to get back to running, and what you’re doing is you’re walking, punctuated by really short runs.
Let’s say that you are returning from injury. You have been trying to get back to running without reactivating your stress fracture or flaring up, or your plantar plate sprain getting aggravated, or straining your healing Achilles tendon or whatever.
You might decide to do a very common thing, which is the walk run routine.
One common example of this is that you might be told that you should walk for five minutes and then run for one minute, and then repeat, walk for five minutes, run for one minute, walk for five minutes, run for one minute.
The idea is that you’ll only end up running a few minutes out of, let’s say, 30 minutes, right?
So if you do a 30 minute workout like that, you’re only running like five minutes or something.
The idea back of this is that you are only running for a few minutes. Therefore it must be less stressful.\, because you have time to walk to see how you feel, to make sure that you do not feel anything flaring up.
But that’s not really how I think about this.
And let me try to explain why I don’t like it.
The problem is this when you you’re walking and then you run and you are only running for a minute, the very beginning of that little one minute of run and the ending of that little one minute run is that you’re actually starting and stopping. You’re accelerating and decelerating at the beginning of that one minute, and you’re decelerating at the end of that one minute.
Acceleration and deceleration actually requires a lot of force, and it creates a lot of negative forces in your foot that can be stressful to your healing stress related injury.
It doesn’t matter which injury it is. It could be a plantar plate sprain. It could be Achilles tendonitis. It could be a metatarsal stress fracture.
Here’s how I know.
Shear stresses and shear forces are the things that cause ulcerations in diabetic feet. What do I know about that? Well, I treated a lot of those. In fact I won an award from the American Podiatric Medical Association for research I did related to bone infections that happen after diabetes get those ulcerations under the heel bone. But aside from that, here is my experience that you can probably relate to…
One year I was doing Ironman Louisville with a buddy of mine named Henry. We were supposed to do the entire race together. At least, that was the plan. But Henry, was a lot stronger cyclist than me, and maybe he’s a little bit more pathologically competitive as well.
At one point, early in the bike, he took off chasing a group of people, of course, people he didn’t even know, but just because he thought that he could. And as you guessed it, he cooked himself on the bike.
When I got to the transition and got off the bike and we got ready to start the marathon, I found him in the change tent, just sitting there in a plastic lawn chair. He was kind of pale white and looked completely exhausted.
Henry said, “I’ have been waiting there for me for 20 minutes.”
I wasn’t slow on the bike. But Henry was very fast and he was completely beat. And so I knew that he was cranking super, super, super hard, if he went 20 minutes faster than me.
Henry said, “Man, I gotta a rest.”
And I said, “Dude, you can rest on the run. We gotta go!”
I was on pace for our goal time. So we got up and we left and we started running. Well, we didn’t really run that far before Henry was completely out of gas and wanted to start walking. He was having a very, very difficult time running.
About halfway through the marathon, Henry said, “I can’t run anymore.”
All along the marathon course there were traffic cones every 30ft or so.
Henry said, “Okay, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re going to walk to the next cone, and then we’ll run to the next cone, and we’ll walk to the next cone and run to the next cone.”
We did that “walk-run- routine” for at least ten miles.
Being a podiatrist, I knew that if I was going to have to start and stop over and over for ten miles, I was going to get shear forces, the negative forces I was just talking about on one foot. I only wanted them on one foot. So I always started and stopped with my right foot.
And, it may not surprise you to hear that I got a blister about like that big on the bottom of my right foot. But I didn’t explain this to Henry, and so he basically just naturally ended up starting and stopping on both feet. Guess what? He had the same blister on both feet. And so those blisters that you get on the ball two foot from stopping and starting and stopping and starting, it’s because of the shear forces from your foot sliding in your shoe with the extra force of pushing off and stopping again.
Why am I explaining all this to you?
It is precisely those kind of shear forces that can not only aggravate the skin and cause blisters, but they can aggravate all kinds of common overtraining injuries from running like plantar plate sprains, neuromas, or stress fractures. And that’s my worry with this walk run routine.
It is crazy how often I talk to recovering runners and they tell me they were just told by a doctor that just go out and do the “walk-run routine.”
But when you do that routine, you are mostly walking mostly and only running a little.
You’re really adding a lot of shear forces percentage-wise. And it just seems like adding unnecessary risk to your return to running plan.
I personally would much rather do a walk for warm up, run a short distance, but consistently do the run portion, and then cool down and see how things feel. That I believe is a whole lot safer.
There are also other modifications that you can do to even decrease the risk further, but you have to think about the things that you’re doing, whether or not they really and truly make sense.
If a doctor tells you to do something, it seems like way out of your comfort zone. You probably shouldn’t be doing it. Get a second opinion.
If you’re trying to figure out what you’re doing wrong in your routine to return to running plan, or why it’s taking so long for you to get better, you’re probably missing some really small pieces and could make some modifications to that plan that might help you. If you want to talk about the strategies to do that, you can get on a 10-minute strategy call with me by going to docontherun.com and then click on the Talk To The Expert tab. We can jump on a call and try to figure out what you need to do to get back to running a whole lot faster.
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