Steady State

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Each year, 80% of runners experience overuse injuries, which include various tissues like muscles, tendons, bones, and joints.

This high percentage highlights the importance of understanding and preventing these injuries to maintain your running routine without disruption.

Tendons (e.g., Achilles, upper hamstring), muscles (e.g., arch of the foot, calf), bones (e.g., shin splints, stress fractures), and joints (e.g., arthritis, runner's knee) are often victims of overuse injuries.

Fortunately, most running overuse injuries have a lot in common, making the solution relatively straight-forward.

The majority of us will experience some form of chronic low back pain throughout our lifetime.

It’s a complex issue that is unique to the individual. However, there are clear relationships between mindset and movement patterns that are observed with symptom improvement.

This is not meant to devalue pain or to say that the pain is “all in your head,” but to highlight the power of mindset and movement and positive outcomes. In the end, research suggests there is a 90-100% correlation between becoming less protective with movements and a decrease in pain.

The 10% rule for increasing mileage is commonly adhered to by runners and coaches, even though there have been studies showing no difference in injury risk between groups following a 10% increase rule and groups following a 25% increase rule (Damsted et al 2018). In both groups, 20% of the runners sustained an injury over the course of the 8-week study.

Why is that? The only logical answer is that there must be much more to injury rates than just how far/long you are running.

Here are some metrics you can use during your training to account for the factors that the 10% rule ignores!

It is common to optimize your prerun marathon plan.

It is far less common to optimize your POST-MARATHON plan.

This shouldn't be the case, as a few weeks after running a goal race like a marathon is one of the most common times for a new running injury to pop up.

Fortunately, we’ve found a few key tips that help our runners avoid a new setback during this crucial period.

While these tips are relatively general, we do find runners often aren’t optimizing their more basic recovery needs.

The odds are high at some point in your life you will experience an achy pain in the buttock that can radiate down the leg.

Sciatica is an annoyance and can vary from mild discomfort disrupting our recreational activities to severe pain interfering with basic daily tasks.

Its symptoms can be frightening to experience.

However, the majority of these mild to moderate symptoms can be successfully managed without serious medical intervention.

Below is Steady State’s 3 step process to treating IT Band related pain:

Step 1 - Restore, not rest
Find a tolerable activity level that minimizes symptoms
Begin loading in a graded manner that does not aggravate symptoms

Step 2 - Reload to 100%
Progress to include heavy strengthening and plyometrics
Build running back to desired levels

Step 3 - Optimize for longevity
Build beyond prior levels of strength to decrease your likelihood of a recurrence of symptoms.

Running is one of the most rewarding activities—but when you have pain, it can feel like an endless cycle of setbacks.

If you’re dealing with an injury, you’re not alone. At Steady State, we specialize in helping runners not just recover, but come back stronger.

Here’s a look at some of the most common running injuries we see, why they happen, and how we help runners get back to pain-free miles.