As a runner and coach, most often I see injuries happen because of one core reason, and that’s training load errors.Overtraining.Too much too soon.Whatever you call it, this mistake is the reason I believe most injuries happen!
The reason for most #running injuries may come down to training load errors.
Click to Tweet<p>Today I’m gonna talk about why injuries happen.</p><p>Most often, and I’ve found that in my experience as a coach as an athlete through tirelessly continually reading about injury and prevention and what other experts have to say, most often it comes down to some type of training load error.</p><p>You may have heard this before as called <strong>too much too soon.</strong> Basically, what it comes down to is you put the body through more training load, more stress, then it’s adapted to and it overloads the muscle, tendon, bone, whatever have you.</p><p>This can happen numerous ways. Perhaps you too aggressively increased your weekly running volume and you started running too much too soon. Maybe you jumped into track workouts too quickly. Maybe you went from a period of rest after a half marathon and jumped into ten times 400 meters hard and that was a little bit much for the calves and you kind of strained your calf a little bit. Maybe you did that hard workout, everything went well but you didn’t give your body adequate time and opportunity to rest and regenerate after that hard workout and jumped into doing another hard workout or too much mileage too quickly after the track workout. That was more related to doing too much in a period of time that should have been dedicated towards recovery, rest, and adaptation. Even in cases where you develop something like a stress fracture due to nutritional deficiency, perhaps it’s still a training load error because if you would have lowered your training load to a level that you’re nutritionally deficient bones could handle & you wouldn’t have gotten injured. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t address the root cause, but the root cause is often also related to training load errors.</p><p>Another example of a training load error is when you go for a run, everything went well, but you feel a little potential niggle in your hip for. You have two choices, give it a couple of days, rest & cross train instead and see how it feels three days from then with an easy one to three-mile jog or you could go out and do your regularly scheduled run the next day. I’m using this example because this happened to me a few weeks ago, my hip just wasn’t feeling quite right the day after a good workout so I gave it a few days and I’m totally fine now. The training load error could have occurred if I would have continued with my regularly scheduled training load so I often say the best runners, the least injured runners, are the best resters because they rested when they felt they should have rested. Now I’m uninjured and I’m running good. so that’s another example of a training load error.</p>