Every year you can read or hear about injury prevention guidelines. Most often they are basically the same recommendations as presented in previous years. This includes wearing the right running shoes, increasing the intensity and/or mileage gradually, paying more attention to early warning signs, varying your workouts, increasing your flexibility and strength and fueling your body properly.
These are all good recommendations that everyone usually agrees with. However, even with these recommendations in effect, injuries still continue to occur. In addition, the number and severity of the injuries appears to be increasing.
The response to the increase in injuries is usually to the effect that runners don’t adhere to or pay attention to these recommendations. But is this really so? From my experiences in working with hundreds of runners, two key factors are omitted in these lists of recommendations.
They are running technique, i.e., running form (how the runner runs), as for example, is touchdown on the heel first, midfoot or ball of the foot? Is his trunk upright or does he lean forward? Does he have excessive amounts of shoulder and/or hip rotation?
The other main factor is development of the physical qualities specific to the technique. For example, does the runner have sufficient levels of strength to handle the forces encountered depending upon his particular running technique? Does he have sufficient strength of the muscles that are involved in every foot plant?
More specifically, does the runner have sufficient strength of the foot muscles, strength of the calf muscles, strength of the hip joint muscles for forward and backward thigh movement and strength of the hip abductors which play an important role in keeping the hips level. Also, does the runner have sufficient strength of the lower back muscles to maintain proper running posture?
Strength in these instances is general strength of the muscles that are involved in the pushoff and in the touchdown. However, the better runner also needs special strength of the muscles involved in forward propulsion. In this case, development of strength must be in the same manner as exhibited in the running stride.
The specialized strength is especially important because many injuries are often due to improper neuromuscular coordination in the pushoff and preparation for landing. By developing the strength of the muscles as they are used in the running stride, you improve and enhance coordination, and at the same time speed.
With special strength of the main muscles as they are involved in the running stride, your run becomes much safer and you become less prone to injury. General strength is great for simply overcoming force, but it will not help prevent injuries if it is not related to the neuromuscular coordination witnessed in running.
When strength training is recommended for runners, it is usually training for general strength, not specialized strength. General strength exercises are great for developing the base needed upon which you can then do specialized strength and explosive exercises.
For more information on how to prevent injury with good running technique and development of strength specific to the actions seen in running, read the second edition of Explosive Running. It has several major chapters devoted to these topics and the information is illustrated with photographs, of not only running technique, but also the specialized strength and explosive (speed) exercises.her