Injury Prevention

I will link to pages in my blog that tackle certain aspects of injury prevention


1. HAMSTRINGS
2. Romanian deadlift


FLEXIBILITY
1. Good bilateral piriformis stretch (in front the TV?)

SWIM
1. Cycling wrists


CYCLE

RUN



Here is a link to my core exercises - they come from McMillan running

Here is a list of exercises I have found over the years that are useful;

These lists are mainly reminders to me. I'll go through in time and and explain what they mean in more detail when time allows

Here is a good link from Roberto who does my massage when I have the wonga. http://www.robertofitness.com/page23.html

1. single leg squat - brilliant exercise - all physios get you to do this to assess propensity to injury. essentially looking for two things, balance, and your knee moving towards/across the centre, which it isn't meant to (sign of glut med weakness/poor activation - this is the cause of most knee pain). So do this and concentrate on stopping the knee moving in.

- keep knee behind toes and still to hit glut, knee over/in-front of toes to hit quads

2. stand on one leg bare feet with eyes shut for one minute. No grunting or flapping arms around


I take quite a pragmatic view to all of this. It is probably one of the areas in which no one completely agrees, different approaches exist and philosophy continues to evolve.

Reading around the subject it seems you can either strengthen something or stretch it. In addition to that you want your strength to be applied at the right time - this is more functional and is often referred to as activation patterns. I found the exercises mentioned on this page when I started looking at rehab exercises and thought why not do them before you have a problem.

FLEXIBILITY

Flexibility is important as it allows your body to have the full range of motion for your chosen sport and goes someway to helping the body absorb some shock. Running for instance is to a large degree bouncing along with your legs returning the force they absorbed from the previous ground contact - if they are overly stiff this can result in injury, but you want appropriate stiffness in an elastic sense.

Practically

1. The ITB (ilio-tibial band) is one of the main culprits in stopping your race - it is my main fear as it has happened before. Classically it is a lateral knee pain that can feel like a knife coming on at a set distance.

- how do you know if it is tight? In my experience stand feet hip width apart hands on hips keep head above feet and make circles with hips. The limitation to perfect circles in my case is due to tight ITB on that side.

- treatment;
The best write up on how to tackle this I have found is at http://optimumsportsperformance.com/blog/?s=itb
There is a section on golf and a section on knee pain - both are really good.
Strengthening gluteus medius is the key