Creating Resilient Runners

by Mitch Hauschildt, MA, ATC, CSCS

On Tuesday, I had the privilege of delivering a webinar with my good friends at WebExercises.com on helping to injury proof runners and improve their performance.  In this week’s blog post, I wanted to recap the webinar and also make sure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy a recorded version of the webinar if you weren’t able to make it or wanted to revisit any of the concepts.

The main points that we discussed for training distance runners that we discussed are as follows:

• The times of greatest discomfort are our greatest opportunity for growth.  The goal here is to get outside of the runner’s comfort zone and do things that they aren’t used to doing.  This includes high load, low rep strategies for strength training.  Usually people tend to do the things that runners like.  This includes working on high reps and low load programs.  The thought is that since they are endurance athletes that we should perform endurance training.  The problem with that thought process is, endurance runners don’t need more endurance training.  They get enough of that while they run.  Their training needs to focus on strength, power and stability.
• Train for power.  This can include olympic lifts and plyometrics, but can also be as simple as some box jumps, broad jumps and squat jumps.  Anything that forces them to create force in a small amount of time is going to be good for them.  This, along with the higher loads discussed above, will improve bone density and the tensile strength of their connective tissue.
• Work in the Transverse plane.  Most runners hate to rotate.  They feel really comfortable in the Sagittal plane, doing everything straight ahead.  But, a lot of our dysfunction lies in the transverse plane.  Poor rotary stability leads to stress fractures, foot pain, and shin splints.  It also leads to poor performance due to a lack of ability to have a stable foundation to push off of while running.  This transverse plane training should include working on both the spiral line and functional line.  Start with anti-rotation exercises and move to dynamic rotation as they are ready for it.
• Address postural concerns.  Most runners over time begin to lean forward which leads to a shortened stride length and poor ability to consume oxygen.  Both of these issues will decrease performance and lead to tissue breakdown over time.
• Train the lateral line.  Working in the frontal plane (side to side motion) is another area that runners don’t like to do very much.  Training the frontal plane with things like lateral lunges, sidesteps and lateral jumps will decrease the rate of knee pain and crossover gait.
• Assess first.  If you don’t know your patients and clients, you can’t help them appropriately.  Make sure you always perform a quality assessment first, before you start to train them.
• Work on stability training.  This goes hand in hand with the transverse plane movements that we discussed above.  Poor trunk stability will make it impossible to stabilize the pelvis which will lead to performance and injury issues.

If you missed it, visit this link for a recorded version of the webinar.  Thanks to WebExercises for the opportunity and for everyone who attended.