Repost: I originally posted this in October 2011 but lost it in the great porn/spam database hack debacle of January 2012.
Purpose: To highlight some key differences in impact loading in older runners versus younger runners (more…)
Audience: Runners and Therapists
Purpose: A quick guide to running injury prevention.
Preamble
Injury prevention for runners is not rock-solidly founded in science… and may not even be possible. With runners it is more injury management. You are going to get injured and you are going to have some aches and pains. The ideal is to minimize your lost training time and avoid some of the nasty injuries that can jeopardize your long term running and goals. (more…)
Audience: Runners and therapists
Purpose: A reference to compare running technique
Limitations: Many of us assume that there is one right and better way to run. Deviations from that ideal are assumed to lead to injuries and decreased economy. This is still a debatable concept. Everything I write can be questioned so please do so.
Below is a video of Nicole Stevenson (www.nicolestevenson.com). Nicole is Canada’s former number 1 in the Marathon with a personal best below 2:33. Nicole is also a running coach
I wanted to highlight some probably beneficial components of her running gait. Future posts will look a deviations from this gait and how they might relate to injury. (more…)
Audience: Runners
Purpose: To give a pictorial basic background into the movements that occur in the sagital plane (i.e. looking from the side) of the lower extremity during running at 3.1 meters/second (about a 5 minute km) and “sprinting” at 3.9 meters per second (about a 4.17 minute km). (more…)
Audience: Runners and therapists
Purpose: advocate hip strengthening exercises
The “core” gets all the press. But when it comes to running research and injury prevention I would sooner extol the virtues the butt. The side of the butt to be most specific.
These muscles (gluteus medius/minimus and gluteus maximus) are huge in the relationship to injuries to the knee, hip and spine. If you want to split hairs you can call them part of the core (you should, but most people don’t).
For a decade, I swear its been that long, researchers (and their readers like me) have advocated that runners should train these muscles and forgo stretching if they had to pick between the two exercise possibilities (I’ve softened my stance on stretching, more posts to follow). The exercises are easy to do and can be fit in after a good run.
To support these views the Toronto Star just published a summary of a paper by Reed Ferber out of Calgary. He runs a great lab and worked with Irene Davis (a superstar researcher in running biomechics), before starting his lab in Calgary. His research publications are quite exceptional and if I were still a researcher they would make me envious.
See the Star article here: http://www.healthzone.ca/health/dietfitness/fitness/article/960175-researchers-get-hip-to-the-root-of-knee-pain-for-runners
For those interested in training their hips here are a slew of exercise programs (click on the links):
1. Patellofemoral pain treatment
2. Neuromuscular control of hip and knee function
4. Side Bridge variations - the best exercise to work the gluteus medius
One of my favorites is below. The one leg squat with leg raise. Most Toronto Physiotherapy places advise that you do the clamshell or side lying leg raise. The problem (click here for a detailed review) is that the exercises only work the hip stabilizing muscles about 40% of their max. This is not enough. Muscles get stronger when you stress them. Unless you just had a hip replacement forget about these remedial exercises - unless maybe you truly are super weak here, then you need them.
Otherwise, train harder. You are an athlete and a runner.
Have fun,
Your Toronto Physiotherapy snob,
Greg Lehman
Audience: Therapists, Trainers & Runners
Main Point: The hamstrings do NOT significantly flex the knee at toe-off. In other words, runners do not consciously flex their knee when they are running and training this is most likely folly. I have read a number of chiropractic and physiotherapy running “experts” who advise people to actively flex their leg off the ground and keep it flexed so as to change the moment of inertia about the thigh when someone is running. The idea is to get the weight of the leg closer to the hip joint so it is easier to swing the leg forward. The problem with this idea is that the hamstrings do not do this when you are running. Knee flexion occurs passively. It is a result of the hip flexing rapidly and powerfully. While the knee is flexing the quadriceps are actually active. They are acting to control the amount of knee flexion. This is what puts strain on the rectus femoris. (more…)
I just got excited with this old paper by Eva Andersson and my graphic designs (not really) with Adobe Illustrator. Below are some graphics that explain the muscle activation workings of the hip flexors during running. Figure 1 shows muscle activation and hip range of motion during running at 4 metres per second (about a 20:50 5km run). Please note, raw EMG does not look like my blue scribbles - it is just a schematic so back off. As physiotherapists we love to talk about analyzing gait. But I am not sure we really know much about it. I often hear some brutal concepts about running that fly in the face of some pretty old research. This post along with a million to follow will slow build some good foundations of running biomechanics literature.
Figure 2 shows when all of the hip flexors are active during the running gait cycle. (more…)
Stu McGill was an author on this paper when it came out back in 1998. At the time, I was one of Stu’s grad students putting electrodes onto anyone I could find for the price of Gyro sandwich. I even burned (chemically and transiently) the thigh of a girlfriend at the time. I knew how to treat the ladies. Unfortunately, I never really picked Stu’s brain about this paper. It was only relevant to me at the time because we were strongly questioning the necessity of double leg lifts as an exercise for the “lower abs”. We felt they were unnecessary to recruit the lower abs and too costly because of the compressive and anterior shear component applied to the lumbar spine. Our argument was that there is no difference between the upper section of the rectus abdominis and the lower section. I still stand by it and the paper is here ( http://ptjournal.apta.org/content/81/5/1096.full ). Regardless of my youthful oversight, I still love the paper and the ideas of sticking needles into the psoas. It must feel awesome hence the “n” of only 5. Below are a few tidbits that will lead into future posts on psoas function. (more…)
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