Running is a fantastic form of exercise, it helps to boost your cardiovascular fitness, improves your strength and maintain your weight.
There can be a worry that you’ll pick up injuries when you run, but if you plan your training carefully and have a balance between running and strength exercises you can progress well.
Understanding how you respond to injury is a huge step when it comes to planning training programmes.
I’ve spoken in the past about being injured not only affects you physically but also psychologically as well.
The most frustrating and devastating day I had almost 15 years ago was being told I’d never play football again by a consultant.
I’d gone through the process of having an MRI done after having months of physio from my reoccurring back injury.
I thought I’d beaten the agonising pain in my back and legs, but as soon as I started playing and working again the same feelings cropped up again.
Being injured can often be a huge blow mentally and physically. Injuries can range immensely from strains to fractures and can have a huge range of affects from bruising, swelling, cuts and surgery.
This is why it is important to monitor your training appropriately to prevent long term injuries happening.
Now that races are starting to make a slow reappearance in the calendar, training is starting to feel like it has a purpose again, other than stress relief.
I’m going to go through what rotator cuff injuries are and how that can then lead to shoulder pain and shoulder problems.
You might think that shoulder work as a runner might be lower down on your priority. You might be thinking your legs need a bit more strength work putting into them, but your shoulders are just as important, particularly when it comes to obstacle races. It is a given that your shoulders and your upper body strength is going to be needed, particularly if you're thinking about pull-ups and monkey bars and any rig work that you might be doing, but link it back into your running form. You're going to be using the arm movement through your normal natural swing. So the positioning that you're going to be in is really important.
I'm going to go through what IT band syndrome is, you might know it as your iliotibial band, it can be shortened to IT band, ITB syndrome, ITBS. It’s a common over use injury that leads to a thickening of the connective tissue that runs from your hip to your knee. And as that thickens, that causes the tightness, tensions and inflammation within that area, which then leads to the pain in your knee. Your IT band helps to stabilize your knee joint, it stops that rotational movement happening. When it gets weakened, that's when it becomes painful.
We're going to look a little bit today about what is runner's knee. Commonly, this is when you're getting pain at the front of your knee when you're running.