Mark and Brian at Fitness for Life Physical Therapy. We’re coming up on the season that people want to go out and run because they’ve got all these charity events and runs. Plus it’s warm outside, you know, might as well get off your butt and get off the couch.
Walk/runs can lead to issues because people go out there and haven’t done anything in preparation to do these races or these fun events, and then they end up getting injured. What we want to talk about this month is some different suggestions of what you can do to maybe start preparing yourself for when you go out there. If you’re not used to going those distances and and even over certain types of terrains can be very different stressors on the body.
Also, if you haven’t been doing anything over the winter, a lot of people like to get out and run for an hour or something the first time and if you haven’t been doing that, your body’s not ready for it. What we’d like to do is talk about a few things that people can do to get better prepared.
The first suggestion that we’re going to have before we talk about anything physical is this: don’t go out and think if you ran last summer and were running 5Ks and then haven’t done anything all winter that you can pick up where you left off. You need to restart slowly, slowly build your way back up into these things.
Slowly build up because your body has to get used to this kind of stresses again. So common things right off the bat, make sure you’re trying to walk more with your feet straight.
We see a lot of people walk with those feet turned out and then they go run the same way with their feet turned out. Inevitably, they injure their fee, or get plantar fasciitis, knee pain and more. Just getting in the habit of keeping your feet more straight when you walk, that can help transfer over to when you’re running or when you’re doing these race/walks.
That’s going to be the first tip. Just start working on that. Start getting more active again. Stay tuned and subscribe to our YouTube Channel where we will give you a few suggestions on other movements that will help you prepare to run again in our upcoming videos. If you have further questions, contact Mark and Brian at fitnessforlifept.com