Sprinting and Injury Prevention.
Why you need to get to Track
- To Reduce The Risk of Injury during High Speed Running.
Running fast puts you at greater risk of injury, therefore you need to run fast. (I can see you reading this and trying to decide if you should read more but please stick with me).
One of the goals of low heart rate training is to spend lots of time at low heart rates, however a certain amout of time needs to be spent sending your heart rate through the roof. There are only two ways to do that, track speed workouts, and hills. The above concept is dependent on you being healthy and injury free.
What do we put at risk during fast running? In my experience of rehabbing athletes it would be hamstrings first, then calves and lastly quads.
One of the most important physiological concepts is that of tissue adaptation. Place a muscle, tendon, ligament or bone under strain in a controlled environment and it will strengthen and adapt. The opposite is also true where you place those tissues under too much strain, instead of adapting, they get damaged. Neglect controlled strength and speed work and you become weaker over time.
If you are a parent or teacher you will know the scene well. It’s sports day and the moms and dads get a chance to race each other. I can only speak of what happens in the dads races, but can’t imagine that the mom’s races are any different. The gun goes and your body goes from a state of rest into one of high panic. Within seconds your heart rate jumps through the roof and a short while later you get pins and needles through your hands. That’s when things really get rough. You get bumped out of the way by someone who now has a beer belly but used to be a sprinter in school. Dads start cutting corners with other dads swearing at them and then, yes, you guessed it, the former star school sprinter comes to a sudden and painful halt. He has a grade two tear of his hamstring. He still had the intrinsic speed but his tissues are no longer adapted to that level of running.
Take home point. You want to have strong bones, tendons, muscles and ligaments. They will serve you well as you grow older. However they strengthen over time when you progressively and responsibly load them.
Well, maybe if high speed running increases the risk of injury I should try and do some other stuff to get strong?
That is an idea and we are major fans of some form of cross training for athletes, however, nothing sets up loads to cope with high speed running as high speed running does.
For example, let’s look at your hamstring and what it needs to put up with. You hammy reaches peak levels of force and lengthening as your lower leg swings forward. Your powerful hip flexors swing your upper leg forward and your quads swing your lower leg forward. Your hamstrings now need to slow and stabilize that movement as your foot places on the ground. Peak hamstring force across the knee joint can range from over 5000 to 11 500 Newtons at this point, which is at least 8 times the runner’s average body weight. Just to put that in perspective, a weak, floppy fish kinda handshake, the kind that leaves you with a mild shiver, generates approximately 5 N of force. That, versus 11 thousand N of force and you get an idea of just how hard your hamstring is working.
You can try all sorts of exercises in gym but you will never get that amout of load going through your hamstring. Remember, nothing loads sprinting muscles as much as sprinting does. Remember too, from point 1 that we are interested in getting our tissues to adapt over time to these stresses.
2. Performance Benefits
The way that we build fitness levels at SBR Sport Individualized Coaching is to get you to do lots of low heart rate training. I have written about the benefits of this on numerous occasions. This is the first article of a 4 part study that I wrote.
However, getting you to run faster is not just about low heart rate running. We need to throw various things into the mix including high speed track workouts, hill repeats, strength work etc.
If you want to run faster you need to be able to run both slower and faster with a stronger body.
So, some ideas to get you going. Do a few 1 km runs and push as hard as you can on those. Be careful though with regard to doing a proper warmup and also that you are running with correct form.
From there, you can begin to introduce over time, 30 to 90 second intervals. Or, better still, get involved with our track sessions. We hold one in Sunninghill on Tuesdays from 5.15 to 6.15 pm, and one in Linden on Thursdays from 5 to 6 pm.
High speed days need to be followed by either rest days or low heart rate training days. Remember, your tissues adapt during times of rest.
For us, the warmup period is vital and comprises of a number of dynamic movements and drills. You never want to go into speed work if you are not properly warmed up, which is exactly what happens at thousands of school sports days around the world.
Who will benefit from speed work?
Basically everyone. From Moms and Dads at school meets, all the way through to Comrades and Ironman runners. There is a direct correlation between your mile time and your Comrades time. Again, this is due to all running being a combination of speed, strength and endurance. So, don’t make the mistake of just doing endurance work and even worse, endurance work that is too fast for true endurance, but too slow to build speed.
Remember rapid increases in the amount of high speed running or running at significantly faster paces that you are used to, carry an injury risk if you don’t build gradually.
Yours in running faster,
Mike Roscoe.
