Cat Fitzgerald PT, DPT, CSCS
No runner wants an injury! Injury prevention is great, but too often I meet runners that know strength training helps build durability but haven’t managed to fit it in, or realized they’ve increased their mileage too quickly, or squeezed all of their runs for the week into a few days. Let me introduce training guardrails!
For each training cycle for each runner, I like to establish guardrails. These are hard and fast rules surrounding your training to avoid decisions that lead to injury. The idea is that we make the decisions up front, before you’re in the moment trying to decide what to do, so that you stay on track. Injuries are not 100% preventable, but we can establish boundaries that decrease your risk and take zero time!
While each runner needs guardrails specific to them (a real life example: requiring one full good night’s sleep between a long run day and going to an all night rave), there are some general categories that everyone can consider.
#1: Sleep
If you do not sleep at least ______ hours, do not run the next day. We’re looking for a minimum here, not the ideal. This is a particularly helpful guardrail for runners who work late or those with babies and small children that aren’t sleeping well. For me personally, this number is 6 hours. I know I will not function well under that, and by running all I’m doing is depleting myself further and increasing my injury risk. Ideally, I’d be sleeping 8-9 hours, but if that was what I needed to be able to run the next day, I’d be missing quite a few runs!
#2: Fueling before runs
You must eat something before workouts and long runs. Again, individual dependent, but if we’re starting with not eating at all prior to these runs, establish that you must eat something to be “allowed” to do anything other than an easy run.
#3: Rest Day(s)
You must take a full rest day every ____ days. Everyone needs a full rest day with no purposeful exercise, but how often will vary. Some runners do well with one a week, some two a week, some one every 9-10 days. The point is that you are creating a rule up front that proactively puts these full rest days on your calendar.
#4: Recovery time between workouts and/or long runs
Prior to starting training, establish how much time should be kept between quality runs, including long runs. For example, if you are doing one workout per week and one long run, you might keep two days between those runs. If you do a speed workout on a Wednesday, then the long run will be on Saturday at the earliest. If the workout needs to shift to Thursday for whatever reason, the long run moves to Sunday. Do what works for you. The idea is to establish this rule up front so that you’re not cramming quality runs too close together and significantly increasing your injury risk.
These are things to think through (perhaps with your coach and PT) before starting a training cycle so that you don’t need to be making last minute decisions during a busy week.