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What happened when I didn’t take my own advice

The time I didn’t take my own advice

4 years ago I hurt my hip/back. I was mucking about with some pretty aggressive mobility drills and over did it.

At first I didn’t think it was too bad.

Within an hour I couldn’t sit down comfortably.

It got worse as the day went on. By the following day I was sitting down on my right bum cheek and slowly lowering my left onto the seat.

It took me 8 weeks to get back to lifting in the gym to return to normal.

But it took 8 months before I was running well again.

All because I didn’t follow my own advice.

There’s a big leap going from being in pain to pain free.

A big one from pain free to regaining strength and movement.

And a bigger one from regaining strength to restoring the resiliency needed for running.

It’s NOT about doing more work but doing the right work.

It’s not about a whole bunch of different exercises but about progressing the correct ones. I stopped my progressions too early in my rehab and paid the price.

I should have been back running pain free in 3 months once I started running again not 6.  On top of not completing the rehab I rushed the return to running part too.

It’s very embarrassing.

I was out for a nice easy 30 minute run and got to the halfway point when I noticed my hip. A couple of minutes later it wasn’t a “feeling” it was pain.

Shooting pain right through my left glute.

Fan-*********-tastic I thought to myself. I tried walking for a bit then running again but it was still sore. A little less so but sore none the less.

The problem was twofold.

  1. I hadn’t followed the rehab right through to the end
  2. I had returned to continuous running too soon.

This meant I had missed out on the very important last phase.  Creating resilience.

It’s here that we bulletproof ourselves. Where the activities are demanding and ensure that we know that once complete we are good to go.

The upside of this is a return to running program I created off the back of my own, painful, experience. You can get it here if you would like it

The moral of the story is…

Just because you are pain free does not mean that you are “good to go”. 9/10 this is definitely not the case.

It doesn’t make any difference if it is your hip like me or your knee. You need to go through the full process to ensure that you are as robust as can be.

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Running Repairs – a guide to successful running

One of the great things about running is that it doesn’t require any special equipment or gym membership. A bog standard pair of trainers, you really don’t need to be spending £100+ on shoes, shorts and a t-shirt and off you go. Unfortunately, running injuries are ridiculously common.

The big issue that is often forgotten about is, and let’s be honest, running is hard work.

Running at a moderate pace you are looking at 1200-1500 steps in a kilometre.

On an easy run, the forces that we absorb are around 3 times body weight on each foot strike. Or around 320,000kg, strictly speaking, it’s 320,00N but we’ll stick to a measurement we can all relate to.

Continue reading “Running Repairs – a guide to successful running”

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Ankle injury rehab – walking with intent

Running is supposed to be an enjoyable hobby, yet running causes many people discomfort or problems.  Few runners won’t have had some sort of ankle injury.  From ankle sprains to achilles tendinopathies there are quite a number of tissues you can injure around the ankle. Therefore we aim to make our rehab programs in such a way that you aren’t simply out of pain but truly fit to run again. It is the goal of rehab to ensure that you can engage in thoughtless, fearless movement.  To make sure that everything you do enjoyable and pain-free. Continue reading “Ankle injury rehab – walking with intent”

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Ankle mobility, are you missing some?

Are you missing ankle mobility? Having sufficient range of movement in your ankle is important. If you want to run fast or jump high having good ankle range of movement in dorsiflexion is essential.

This is not just in the sporting environment but simply to walk well we need good ankle mobility. The movement that important is the ability to pull your toes towards you. A lack of dorsiflexion is linked with increased injury risk with achilles tendinopathy and patella tendinopathy having been shown to be impacted by a lack of ankle mobility in dorsiflexion. Continue reading “Ankle mobility, are you missing some?”

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Lower limb injury assessment

The first step in any injury assessment is what previous injuries do you have. The biggest predictor of future injury lies in your injury history. As a result looking into your injury history will play an important roll in deciding on what needs to be done. If you have previously injured your ankle, knee or hip these are areas we need to investigate in the injury assessment. We do this becasue of the scale of the impact they have on the way you move. Two of the more important things that we are looking out for in the clinic are asymmetries and pain.When we are assessing movement we are looking to see both how good it is and does it cause pain. Continue reading “Lower limb injury assessment”

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I keep spraining my ankle, it must be weak

This isn’t an uncommon thing to hear from anyone unfortunate enough to suffer regular ankle injuries. The likely hood that you have weak ankles is very low even if you are spraining one or both of them regularly. The cause of the problem is more likely one of poor communication between the brain and the muscles surrounding your ankle which results in a loss of what we call proprioception. Continue reading “I keep spraining my ankle, it must be weak”

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The 5 most common running injuries

What are the 5 most common running injuries? Running is such an easy form of exercise to get into and a fundamental requirement for a huge range of sports that it is no surprise that a huge number of people run as part of their fitness regime. Running injuries are very common with a figure of around 70% of those who run getting an injury of some sort every year. This isn’t because running is particularly risky rather it’s more that it’s very easy just to stick your trainers on and get cracking.

As a result of the very easy access to using running as a means of getting fit etc people tend to do it without much thought as to what they are doing. When I say this I am talking about how much they are doing in terms of either volume, intensity of effort and also in terms of the skill of running.

Whilst I would agree that we are all born to run not all of us are going to run well straight away and we tend to forget it is actually quite a demanding activity. Training load, the volume and intensity bit above, is generally the biggest factor in the causes of injury whilst the actual skill sits about 3rd but its importance increases as you get better at it and look to make more demands of yourself, the better your form the more likely you are to distribute the stress over the correct areas.

So what are the most common running injuries?

Continue reading “The 5 most common running injuries”

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Why do I stiffen up a few days after treatment?

During an appointment at Performance Sports Therapy we are able to make meaningful changes in how you move and feel. Unfortunately these changes do not always ‘stick’. It isn’t that unusual to get told by people that they felt great for 2 to 3 days and then they stiffened up again. This is completely normal and nothing to worry about because of the reasons why you are feeling tight are not what you might think.

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Continue reading “Why do I stiffen up a few days after treatment?”