Injuries a worry
WITH nine weeks to go until the Gold Coast Marathon events on July 6-7, it is important to keep injuries at bay so you reach the starting line in top shape.
Here are six tips to help you avoid training injury:
1. Strengthen your body. Prepare with strength and conditioning exercises, either at home or with a trainer to provide a gym program. Not only will strength work reduce injury risk, but it has a significant positive effect on your performance.
2. Don’t overstate the importance of stretching or foam rolling. Flexibility is not as important for runners as you might think. Tight muscles, such as calves, hamstrings, and glutes, are in fact typically weak muscles. When the focus is on strengthening these, such as doing calf raises instead of calf stretching or foam rolling, the muscle tightness tends to reduce.
3. Avoid the ‘messy middle’. A training balance of 20 per cent high intensity and 80 per cent low intensity will significantly reduce injury risk. The “danger zone’’ that is not conducive to performance gains and heightens risk of training injury is logging miles at mid-intensity.
4. Less can be more. Don’t do too much too soon. Injury can occur when training loads are spiked in attempting to cram training in a short timeline. Research shows increasing training load by 1.5 times more than the average of the previous four weeks can increase injury risk by 38 per cent. Build training load gradually.
5. Maximise recovery by getting ahead when resting.
Making sure you rest on days off is important for injury prevention. Sufficient recovery time helps absorb training loads and improves performance.
6. Act on niggles and strains quickly.
It can be difficult to know when to seek professional help as opposed to “seeing how it goes’’. If a niggle or strain has not settled, improved or disappeared in 48-72 hours, seek professional help.
More training tips, visit goldcoastmarathon.com.au /training
BRAD BEER IS A SPORTS PHYSIOTHERAPIST