“If I can just get through the first mile, my (ankle, knee, hip, etc.) feels okay.”
One of the trickiest areas for injury recovery is when a runner only needs a few minutes to “warm-up.” After doing so, their pain and soreness goes away.
As a Physical Therapist, I can tell you that it’s often a recipe for disaster – especially if you’re dealing with tendonitis.
The “just need a warm-up” mentality often creates a situation where an injury builds for weeks or months.
What starts off as a minor irritation becomes an injury that can create years of discomfort and trouble running injury-free.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to heal tendinitis for good and avoid injuries in the future.
Watch the video to learn how:
How Tendonitis Develops
When you run, the impact of the ground comes into your body with each step. Ideally, your muscles should absorb the majority of the impact.
However, most runners struggle with their strength. With each step, the impact of running blows past the muscles and crashes into the tendons and joints. The overload to these structures often causes long-lasting injuries.
Avoid This Trap
When faced with a tendon injury, runners will often do exercises like heel drops or hamstring stretches focused on the injured area.
What runners fail to realize is that most tendon injuries are caused by imbalances. This means that doing exercises and stretches centered on the injured tendon will not usually fix the root cause of the injury. In fact, concentrating on the injured areas may even make it more irritated!
Runners who focus only on the tendon area get frustrated when the injury doesn’t heal. Ultimately, many decide to run on the injury anyway because they think it will never get better.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Here’s What to Do
Commit to cross-training for a period of time. For some, this could be a few days – others a few weeks. (Most often, this depends on severity and length of injury.)
Shift your focus to correcting the imbalances that caused the injury in the first place. This will help you recover faster and avoid future injuries.
If you want to fix your imbalances, then check out RunSmart!
Our Physical Therapist-designed workouts were specifically created for runners to fix imbalances that cause tendinitis and other injuries.
With RunSmart, you can prevent injuries and run your best for many years to come!
Ready to Run Injury-Free?
Learn how you unlock injury-free running with this free webinar from Physical Therapist, Steve Gonser.
