Are you injured? Here’s how to deal with doctors who recommend surgery and pain killers, and therapists with their strengthening and stretching regimens. Forget their “remedies;” they don’t address the underlying problem, which is always a combination of over-training and under-resting, which increase the risk of injury and lead to pain.
If you’re in pain when you run, you must change the thinking that led to the injury. You may have thought, for instance, that training for a certain race is vitally important to your running career, despite growing pain. That’s why it’s tempting to rely on experts to fix the injury so you can continue training, hopefully without pain. Sorry, there’s no hope for you along these lines because you’re the only person who can end your injury issue.
The way to end an injury is to reduce training effort. Granted, backing off can be difficult, psychologically. Better—you could think–to train through pain for the sake of your ambition. After all, you may be used to training with chronic pain, so you know it’s possible to bear it a little longer. Discouraged by having tried diverse remedies without a cure, you may have also given up on the possibility that the pain will ever go away.
Yet, all injuries go away if they are treated properly. The treatment process is called rehabilitation, and it’s the process of restoring your body to its natural, pain-free state. Remember, pain is unnatural, even if you’ve begun to think of it as normal. The process begins by slowing down and training under pain, instead of through it. Thus, rehabilitation requires that you abide by the following rule: go slow enough to feel the pain at no more than the tender level on this scale: tender, twinge, ache, sore, severe.
“The rehab process requires daily walking, even for short distances. Short-slow walks keep you in touch with pain at the tender level, without further damage and more pain.”
Along with slowing down to the tender level, the rehab process requires daily walking, even for short distances. Short-slow walks keep you in touch with pain at the tender level, without further damage and more pain. Short-slow walks are essentially an easy warm-up, which enhances the rehabilitation process by reducing stiffness and increasing circulation. But feeling no-pain doesn’t mean you can disregard the basic go-slow rule, for if you train too fast/long the pain will return after the workout as intense as ever, which breaks another rehabilitation rule requiring the pain to gradually disappear.
Losing quality training time is like paying the piper for the overtraining that caused the injury. Slow walking isn’t “training.” So, it’s tempting to think you can speed up the recovery process by doing even less or nothing for a few days. But pain has a way of going away during normal daily activity and returning with a vengeance the moment you resume regular hard training. It’s better to stick with the rehabilitation process which, if you are patient and disciplined, will reduce your pain from day to day.
As an injury goes away, you can go a little longer and then a little faster while still not exceeding the tender level. Done correctly, this simple method reduces even severe pain to no-pain within several weeks. Of course, you might have to bite the “detrained” bullet until you can return to hard training. Don’t worry. You’ll soon get your racing ability back. And, though you might miss a race or two, there will be many more to enjoy.