The zen of shin splints
Most discussions of running injuries tend to focus, not surprisingly, on the act of running. How much mileage were you doing? How does your foot land? What shoes were you wearing? However, a growing body of evidence is making the case for a more holistic understanding of the factors leading to injury. The latest salvo, in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, suggests that sleep patterns and life stresses such as anxiety can contribute to the risk of injury.
Researchers at the University of Limerick in Ireland followed 95 athletes in a variety of endurance sports, including running, for a year, collecting weekly data on subjective perceptions of health, sleep patterns, training load, and sports injuries. Those who reported a psychological complaint such as anxiety or depression were then 32 per cent more likely to suffer an injury the next week. Subjects who averaged less than seven hours of sleep per night for a week didn’t show any immediate negative effects, but if the pattern persisted for two weeks their injury risk soared by 51 per cent.
Such findings are hard to explain with the usual biomechanical models of injury, but they’re not unprecedented. At a conference last summer, Israeli researchers presented data showing that levels of muscle soreness 24 hours after a hard workout could be predicted, in part, by the degree of anxiety the subjects had revealed in a pre-workout psychological questionnaire. And earlier last year, researchers in the Netherlands found that athletes who showed low levels of self-regulation in preseason psychological tests were almost five times more likely to get injured that year.
It’s unlikely that there’s one single explanation for why a psychological test or a streak of bad sleep can predispose you to injury. Instead, there are all sorts of subtle connections that inf luence how you respond to an initial sign of discomfort. Do you ignore it because you’re too tired or preoccupied to notice? Do you dramatically alter your gait because you’re terrified of getting injured, and in doing so bring on a different problem? High levels of life stress may also compromise your ability to recover from the routine physical stress of workouts. From your body’s perspective, Christie Aschwanden points out in Good to Go, her 2019 book on the science of sports recovery, stress is stress, whether it’s the result of a work deadline or a Sunday long run.
Ultimately, it’s probably still true that, as University of Calgary biomechanist Benno
Nigg once argued, something like 80 per cent of running injuries can be traced back to some sort of training error, like increasing your mileage too quickly. Running too much, too fast, too soon are fundamental injury risks. What we’re slowly realizing is that the definitions of “too much” and “too soon” don’t just depend on the numbers in your training log – they also depend on what else is going on in your life.