A pulled or strained calf muscle/shin splints/Achilles tendonitis
seem to be among the most common injuries experienced by runners and
triathletes these days. Every second person I speak to seems to have
experienced some form of strain or injury in the lower-leg region resulting in an
extended lay-off from training.
The most obvious diagnosis by many a therapist would be that
of overuse, which at first may seem like a cliché. How many times have you heard that overuse was
the cause of this injury and that strain? I suspect several.
Yet the term overuse has a deeper meaning, which needs to
be examined closer. Overuse doesn’t only mean that you’ve been running too much
on the right hand side camber of the road. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you
are doing too much mileage either. There are indeed other forms of this term
that you may not have considered.
Uphill
running as overuse
Take myself as an example. For years, my staple “running-diet”
included excessive hill climbing. Most of my training runs would begin on an
uphill with very little flatter terrain involved. My philosophy was that if the
run had no hills and was less than 60 minutes, then it wasn’t real training. So
I would religiously run for just over an hour on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
More often than not on the same loops and over the same hills.
This worked well for years, but what I failed to realize
was that I was slowly grinding my calcaneus into a state of disrepair with the excessive strain
on my calves. I developed a bursa on the outer part of my left heel that would bother
me from time to time, but didn’t give it much thought. In mid-2007, this bursa
started to bother me more and more, effectively retiring me from consistent running
for over a year.
Suffice to say that it has happened to the best, which
makes me feel better:
I continued to religiously stretch my calves and performed daily
amounts of calf-raises that might get into the Guinness Book of Records, yet the pain persisted.
Without realizing it, I was actually overusing my calf muscles as I was trying to remedy the situation. A classic case of the "Catch-22." The combination of hilly routes and my record breaking calf-raise
sessions are a classic example of the term overuse, but not in the
conventional sense.
Not-so-rocket-science
solutions
Fast forward a year or so later and I was slowly starting to
put the puzzle together. I realized that my body was out of balance in addition
to the overworking of my calf muscles. I discovered that my left side was distinctly
weaker than my right. By now in my mid-thirties, these experiences made me
start to learn about my body and I realized that I needed to make some adjustments.
As the "light bulb of realization" flickered to life, I developed the following protocol:
1. Start and finish every run with a few minutes of walking.
This effectively warms up and cools down the muscles in a low-impact kind of
way.
2. Strengthen thy feet. Walking barefoot or in minimalist
shoes has a greater and more functional strengthening effect than any exercise prescribed in a
gym/magazine.
3. Walk/jog backwards for a few steps after running; a
highly effective and functional eccentric exercise. Just make sure you don’t
hit any parked cars.
Take a look at this video demonstrating an eccentric
calf/Achilles exercise shared by friends from Peak Performance Fitness:
4. Do not stretch your calf muscles - it only makes them weaker.
Instead, focus on strengthening them by walking uphill and/or barefoot,
and by doing eccentric exercises.
5. Work on your hamstrings, in terms of both flexibility
and strength. Hamstrings are the most neglected muscle when it comes to leg strengthening exercises. While the leg extension machines have long queues of eager users, the hamstring curl table often sits unused and gathering dust.
6. Vary the terrain and length of your training runs.
“Little bits often” are better than large blocks intermittently.
My previous regimen of 3x1hr runs per week is far less effective than, say, 6-8 consecutive of 20 - 25min sessions.
7. Buy and use a reflexology board (phone Pat: +2721 794 5917).
I use mine while ironing my laundry. Who says men cannot multitask?
8. Slow down your overall training pace (<60% effort)
and make your hard efforts harder as well as less frequent.
