Is your healing running injury suddenly making more “noise” as you increase activity?
That can be confusing. A runner may notice tension, odd sensations, discomfort, or other changes and immediately wonder whether the injury is getting worse.
If you are recovering from an overtraining injury, one of the most useful things you can do is systematically track the severity of the injury as you increase activity.
Click here to download the free Stress Fracture Severity Worksheet.
I was on a call with an ultrarunner who is recovering from an overtraining injury. He is in a phase of recovery that can create two very different risks: overstraining the healing tissue, or backing off too much and allowing unnecessary weakness and atrophy to develop.
As he stepped up his activity, he became concerned because his foot was making more noise.
Importantly, he was not guessing about his activity. He had a clear understanding of his pain levels, his exact number of steps per day, and the exact number of repetitions of the activities he was using to rebuild fitness.
He was tracking everything carefully.
That is a critical piece of the equation.
When you are recovering from an overtraining injury, the goal is to match the strength of the healing tissue with strength-building activities that allow you to get stronger without overloading tissue that is still weaker than normal.
Runners sometimes think this is complicated, but it is really the same concept you already use in training.
You would not go out and run 20 miles of speed work the first time you start training. You build up to it.
During injury recovery, you are applying that same idea on a much smaller scale.
I explained it to him with a construction-site analogy.
If you bought land and were having a new house built, you would expect to hear noise. You would hear saws cutting lumber, hammers driving nails, and construction equipment working.
If there were absolutely no noise, you might wonder whether anything was happening at all.
Healing tissue after an overtraining injury can be thought of in a similar way. Damaged materials have to be carried out, and building materials have to be carried into the injured area.
The pathways for those materials involve fluid movement around the injury site. That fluid can contribute to tension in the tissue, discomfort, odd sensations, and sometimes pain when swelling becomes significant.
This does not mean that pain is automatically good.
You do not want significant pain, and you do not want massive amounts of swelling.
The point is that some changes in sensation may become more noticeable at each new level of activity. You do not want to become frightened by every new sensation without first understanding what it means.
The goal is to heal as quickly as possible so you can return to running as quickly as possible.
That requires understanding when you can add more activity and when you need to back off.
One of the most useful tools in that process is not simply an MRI or an X-ray. It is the tedious tracking of the severity of the injury and the changes in that severity as you heal and return to activity.
Regardless of the type of overtraining injury, you can use the Stress Fracture Severity Worksheet as a model for systematically assessing your injury throughout recovery.
I created the Stress Fracture Severity Worksheet to help runners track the variables that matter instead of simply guessing whether an injury is getting better or worse.
Click here to get the free Stress Fracture Severity Worksheet.
Use it as a model for tracking your injury as you increase activity so you can make better decisions about when to progress and when to back off.
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