What are the top 3 things you do to prevent injury?

Ooof, that is a very hard question to answer! I wish it were that simple, but I will do my best. I also want to add that while this question was “top 3 things you do,” I have to be honest, I am not the best at following my own advice. This is what I would suggest, but I also recognize that I am risking injury myself by not doing these things all the time.

Number one is strength training correctly. This does not mean throwing weights around in the gym, like you see these big gym dudes doing. It also does not mean following the “ten best exercises” you might see in an article and doing them every single day. Ideally, it means working with a strength coach to figure out where the weak links are in your body, and making sure you have your technique down to do them correctly to fix that weakness. 

Number two would be listening to your body when you know it's too much. I know that's an easy thing to say that is harder to put into practice, but the reality is that most of the time we know when we are doing something that's a bit risky. Maybe we had to travel midweek and we pushed our workout back to Friday and then did our long run Saturday, and got invited to a group run on Sunday where the group typically runs faster than we are capable of. While we might hope for the best, it's always better to go into a race or go through training underprepared than over and risk injury.

Finally, I would say do a good warm up before you run. Some static (no movement) and dynamic (movement-based) warmup exercises. These don’t take that long, but give your body a big helping hand in prepping for the run ahead. We’re going to be creating some new videos for you, but in the meantime, these are still helpful! 

If you have a question that you’d like answered, you can email kat@runningforreal.com and she’ll pass it along to Tina!

Our sponsor this week is… Running for Real!

The Mile 20: Mental Training to Win Your Race course will give you the mental training techniques to not only become more confident as a runner, but as a person. We begin with that foundation in building you up as a human being first because we can't be confident as runners until we take care of our confidence in ourselves. You're also going to learn techniques to handle every race day situation that could be thrown at you. You're going to have specific tactics and tools that will help you handle race day panic, race day stress, things that could go wrong. You're going to learn to understand the signals that your body is giving you during the race and how to handle them and also how to protect yourself from feelings of failure.

We runners can be quite hard on ourselves and this is going to help you to have a healthy perspective. This is a 12-week course. Each week we'll have a video for you, and pdf worksheets that you can download and fill in to help really bring home those messages. 

Registration for this season is only open through August 21st, so be sure to go here and sign up now!

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