The worst thing that can every happen to a keen distance runner is suffering with a chronic injury like plantar fasciitis, ITB friction syndrome, or patella-femoral knee pain that hangs around for months or even years. The typical approach to use rest, anti-inflammatory medication, a massage or even some therapy may help to calm the injury down but the minute you go back to running all the pain comes rushing back to the way it was. This is something that could easily be prevented if a carefully designed strength training program is used in combination with your running training. Having been a very keen distance runner for a long time myself, I am very aware of all the injuries associated, and experienced first hand some of these annoying and painful injuries in my time. I was able to get on top of these quickly and over time learned that the secret was using strength training techniques to improve gait and working on my running technique. I found the perfect combination of strength training, stability training, postural retraining, movement skills and more efficient running technique that allowed me to reach my peak when I was in my late 30’s. If only I had been told this many years earlier who knows what I would have been able to achieve. I have since used the same methods for assessing hundreds of runners and sporting athletes to overcome some of the most annoying and chronic injuries preventing them from enjoying their running or sport. In this article, I am going to show you these secrets and also what I have found to be the common traits so you can prevent them from stopping you in your tracks.
How Weak & Stiff Ankles Create A Chain Reaction Of Multiple Injuries
One of the biggest mistakes I have ever made in sporting career is not treating my ankle sprains with enough respect and ensuring I had full mobility, stability and strength before going back to playing and training. I cannot tell you how many times I sprained my ankles, my left ankle in particular suffered at least 3 grade 3 tears plus several smaller tears! Nearly all of us have sprained our ankle at one point in our life and almost all of us are also guilty of under-playing the consequences just like me. After the initial searing pain, we limp home, reach for the pain-killers, get the frozen peas out of the freezer and on the swollen ankle, before resting on the couch with our foot up for an hour or two. After a few days of hopping around we try to soldier our way on, and before you know it the pain has gone, the ankle is a bit stiff, but we feel we will be back to normal in a week or two. It is about this time we think we are okay have got away with just a sprain. But, as I am going to show in this article it is at this time that even the simple grade 1 sprains can create a dangerous chain reaction of compensatory movements that are conspiring to create much more severe and painful problem.
Exercise Solutions For Weak Feet Creating Lower Limb Injuries
Our ability to walk, run and jump is all initiated by our feet. But it is not just walking or running, it is for any movement you do standing up, neural signalling begins at the feet as they are the first part of the body to feel the ground and tell the system what to do. The feet are loaded with thousands of nerve receptors that are very sensitive and designed to help us move. They tell the brain where you are, if you are balanced enough to move yet, and basically instigate movement before it even begins. The better the feet are functioning, the better the signal all the way up the kinetic chain, and the more efficiently we can move. Unfortunately, due to many factors ranging from poor footwear, lack of exercise, poor exercise choice etc, our feet become lazy and weak, and so begins the catastrophic destruction of our movements and joints. It is amazing the correlation between foot instability and knee pain or hip pain. I cannot tell you how many cases we have seen where the foot was the main problem with these injuries. Yet like many other injuries in the body, the area that causes the pain is rarely in pain itself. It sends the problems of instability and dysfunction to other areas. To make matters worse our current health and medical treatments are ignorant to looking for a cause and hell-bent on treating symptoms so this weakness or instability is often left unchecked and continue to cause pain and suffering. In this article, we will try to explain how the foot works and provide some simple exercise solutions to correcting any weakness and instability.