Running

Should that alarm you? Well, I’d have to both agree and disagree on the matter. Yes running may cause injuries, but there’s a saying, the best way to avoid injury is to do nothing, if you avoid the risk, you can’t injure yourself, so we’re covered on the front. However, I would have to disagree, as some of the injuries people describe (knee pain, ankle ache, back pain etc.) are usually, in my experience, just poor training and preparations for the run, and so, I would try to discuss as much base as I can for preparing for a run, set some pointers and try to reduce the risk factor of an injury occurring.

So, you’ve passed the warning, and have decided to start running, long distance, short distance, at first it’s all the same for me, the first few steps and the base are similar. Running, both short and long distance, requires the body to be able to stabilize itself either under great pressure for a short period of time or under moderate pressure for a prolonged period.

A base analyze of a stride motion while running is simple, the feet collides with the ground with a certain force, the force is sent all the way up to the skull while passing through the ankle, knee, hip, pelvic, and spine. Have one junction poorly functioning and the whole system is affected. Say for example, the running surface had a little bump, so the collision with the ground wasn’t as expected, the ankle got a little angle, the force now needs to continue it’s route to the skull, if you’ve done enough stability training, your body would adapt upon impact, and the force would continue it’s way to the top as expected, however, poor ankle stability could cause sprain as the force would stop at that junction and not keep onspreading through to the rest of the body.

On a different point of view, say your ankle is slightly misplaced while running, the impact from the foot landing on the ground would transfer force to the knee which would need to compensate for the ankle, in order to have the force keep it’s route to the hip, but since the force came slightly off from the knee as the compensation may not have been perfect, the hip would require a compensation of it’s own going up to the spine and so on, all those tiny adaptations over a long period of moderate force, or short period of max force passing through (long distance compared to short distance) would cause muscle early fatigue if not properly trained for, which would lead to aches and injury.

Now, for the second aspect of mobility, it would be post exercise stretching. While running we perform the same motion a countless amount of times, or use a lot of force to perform the motion for a few strides, that kind of muscle use would trigger a range of motion shortage to ease the motion of the body while performing the run, so post stretching is a very important activity to be added post run,

to get the joint back from the percentage it locked on during the run to it’s max range. The stretch should be held for a few seconds, usually, you’d feel a bit of pressure from the muscle that is being stretched, but that pressure would reduce in a matter of seconds while the muscle regains it’s range and flexibility. Don’t over do a stretch, not the range, feel your body and work along, over stretching can cause an injury as well.