Why We Get Hurt: Train Smart, Not Just Hard. A Series For Endurance Athletes
Endurance athletes are no stranger to injuries and nagging pains. Runners, swimmers and triathletes joke about what injury is currently plaguing them. Others wear their ability to tough through pain and injury as a badge of honor. It has always seemed to me as if the endurance community simply accepts injury, pain and discomfort as a byproduct or a necessary evil of the activity they love doing. While I’ll be the first to admit to the athletes I work with that it is an unlikely expectation to live life without some nagging pains or little (or big) injuries, and even more unlikely they can push their bodies hard in training for a sport without incurring some unwanted mileage. (I’ll pause for a few seconds while you recover from that puniness.)
BUT, in working with and overseeing the training program of many endurance athletes, I think we can do a lot better than we are. I don’t think participation in a sport has to mean a constant cycle of injury. With smart training, planning, recovery and nutrition, we can minimize a lot of the risks on our body, which means we hurt less. I hope I don’t have to spell out the less you are injured the more consistent and effective your training will be, but understanding why we hurt and get injured from a very simple sense (this is not a science lesson, that’s our job, not yours) can be very helpful to understand why our injuries may have been due to circumstances within our control, like training volume and other variables.
I think we can easily define injury into two separate categories, traumatic and chronic. You will see some commonalities between the explanations of why they occur and what we can do to minimize risk.
Traumatic injuries are when something completely unexpected happens. Many traumatic injuries are difficult to prevent because they occur when the environment throws us a twist that we were not expecting. Maybe it’s some unstable ground shifting or maybe it’s a twenty foot drop off a cliff to escape that cougar. Both have a high risk. I would say, let’s cross stuff like cougar attacks out of the picture. I would love to tell you I can train against injury from that, but the program is still in the works.
The other traumatic injury may still occur. Let’s use the example of rolling an ankle. When you are headed full steam ahead, why does this happen, why is it so much worse for some than others and what can we do to prevent it? Anything? Why we get hurt in this situation can be explained quite simply.
You entered into an environment that you did not have proper control at the joint and whole body level for. Ground got shaky and you did not have the stability and/or mobility to adjust. You did not have the tissue prepared for the load that was put on it. Meaning your ankle rolled and had no resiliency against that, so an injury occurred. Ever look at how freely a skateboarder rolls his ankles without injury? Their tissue is prepared for it.
Chronic injuries have similar root causes but can be a little more confusing, largely because our brain plays a role in deciding whether or not a certain activity is safe, and if we ignore it, pain can be one of the mechanisms it uses to keep us from engaging in that activity. If we try to push through, the pain single can get turned up, even if there is no damage to the body. Again, a massive oversimplification but this process, called nociception can be thought of as the opposite of the placebo response. Chronic Pain can be looked at like this.
At some point, you did something that made the brain worried of injury. Whether that was an actual injury, simply jumping into an intense activity to quickly, or not allowing the body to recover over time, making it feel like it’s breaking down. The pain signal is telling the body this ain’t safe. The big takeaway is that, similar to traumatic injuries, making sure the body is prepped for the activity it is going to be asked to do is the ground floor in injury prevention.
Make sure to keep up with the blog series as I break down individual pieces of a smart training program to get great performance with minimal risk.