Whats up, Motivators Taren here in 2019, American Ironman triathlete Tim O'Donnell
came back to the Ironman World Championship
after several months of barely being able to run due to a running injury.
Yet he had the run of his life,
even though he had barely run in the previous several months.
How was he able to return to running so quickly and so well?
Today we are going to give you the system that you can use for how to return
to running properly so that you are returning to running stronger than before,
you're returning to running quicker than you would.
How do you not use this system?
And it's going to keep your downtime as
short as possible and your runtime as high as possible.
Let's do it. My name is Terry Gazelle.
In my twenties, I was overweight.
Unfulfilled and couldn't even run to the end of the block.
Over the following years, I found endurance sports, lost £65,
won age groups, race world Championships, broke records and trained and learned
from some of the best athletes and coaches in the world.
You too, can use endurance sports
to change your life and accomplish your fitness goals.
You just need a system, a system that's meant for us amateurs
who want to be our best while feeling our strongest and healthiest.
My company, Mottiv, offers that system and I want to share
some of the tips from it today before we get into how do you return to running?
Once you're ready to return to running after an injury, we have to take a step
back to talk about how do you avoid injuries in the first place,
and then secondly, what do you do at the outset of an injury occurring?
Because that is what is going to make
a really big determination of how well you return to running.
We've got a couple of videos for avoiding
injuries and what you do during the period of an injury that will be linked in these
two videos over here at the end of the video.
But the big thing that overlaps with how you return to running after an injury is
the training plan of what you do while you are injured.
So let's go to the board and I'm going
to explain the two options of how to deal with that.
So let's say you've encountered an injury,
you likely have two options that you have to deal with the injury.
Option number one is the preferred option, and this is the keep moving option.
And this is where you want to do whatever you can.
And this is a rule of thumb
from Brody Sharp that you want to keep moving, but limit your movement,
not because zero pain limit your movement to a pain on a scale of zero to ten,
where ten is extreme pain and zero is no pain to about a four or less kind of pain.
So let's say you have a running injury
and running causes a lot of pain, but you're still able to walk.
Well, in that case, you can still walk.
And why this is really important.
We'll actually go to Brody Sharp, who runs the Run Smarter podcast.
He runs the Run Smarter Physiotherapy Clinic, and he talks about why continuing
to move is so important for returning from that injury.
If your injury is well managed and it's
less severe, hopefully you haven't had to cease running altogether.
If you've managed low amounts of running
and still managing to overcome this injury, fantastic.
If you have had time off.
I think the biggest factor that I've seen is the longer you've had time off running,
the slower and more gradual your return to pre injury running needs to be.
And I've seen some people have six months off running due to an injury,
and then they're trying to make a return back to pre injury dosage.
By that stage, the rest of your body is
a little bit deep, conditioned or not necessarily used to running dosages.
So you need to be very gradual not only
for what was your injury, but for the rest of the body as well.
So as Brody says in this option one,
if you continue to move, you're going to be able to come back
to the running or whatever it was that caused your injury much quicker.
And then you kind of just gradually use
that four out of ten scale to just do a little more and a little more
and a little more, making sure that your pain is always at, say,
a two or three out of ten and you're not in pain the next day.
And that alone is, Bam, your return to running protocol.
So the way that you deal with the running
or whatever injury it is, protocol is the same as your return to running protocol.
You just use that four out of ten benchmark and gradually build up.
But what about option two here?
And this is option two where there is absolutely no running.
So this second option is where you're
medically advised to absolutely get away from the thing that causes you pain.
But how do you come back to these activities quicker and stronger?
Well, in this case,
I know that Tim O'Donnell, before the Ironman World Championship,
leaned very, very heavily into strength training, so his body was able
to withstand the run, even though he might not be super run fit.
So in this case, what you're doing is, again, not doing complete rest.
But let's say it's a running injury.
Maybe you're doing water running, maybe you're doing more cycling.
I'll put a link in the description below
to our kettlebell strength and our yoga mobility courses for endurance athletes.
I know that Tim, for a fact,
leaned very heavily into strength so that he could come back and feel stronger.
So in this option two,
it's not continuing to do the thing that caused you the injury.
It's staying away from that when you're
medically supervised and instructed not to do that, but substituting other things
so you can get back into what you love doing much quicker.
So option one, hopefully you've kept
running, in which case you just gradually build up.
Option two, when it's time to actually
start running again, we'll go over to a system that you can use for that.
If you need a plan that is going to help you come back to running from no running.
We know about the run walk method,
and a lot of people might wonder, well, should I actually use this?
There's a study that we've got here
that is going to be linked in the description below.
In this study, people had gone through
a very significant hip surgery that they needed to return to running.
They were all athletes and they wanted to get back to running.
What they took these athletes through was a walk run program where they built up
to being able to do 1 mile at the end of four weeks.
So in week one, they were on a 400 meters
track and they did walk one lap, run one lap, walk two laps.
They did that three times in the first week.
In the second week, it changed to half and half going a lap
of walk, then two laps of run, run, and then a lap of walk.
In the third week, it was walk and then run, run, run for three laps.
And then the fourth week it was just straight running for 1 mile.
The run walk was done three times per week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
And the off days were specifically listed as off but non impact days.
So non impact was swimming, cycling, elliptical, things that weren't pounding
on the body, a little bit of strength or core exercise than with one day of rest.
This might seem a little bit basic, but why I'm sharing this with you is
because as we go forward into the results of this study, you can see that 94 of 97
athletes who wanted to return to running did within that four week period.
And this is after a major, major surgery.
Most of us who are watching this probably aren't recovering from a major surgery,
but this is to say that a run walk, return to running program is very
beneficial and you don't necessarily need to limit yourself to 1 mile.
What you can do instead is return to running and go as long as you can while
you're paying is less than a four out of ten and you're not in pain the next two
days whatsoever, that's going to be an appropriate amount.
So for some people,
that might be ten minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes or 30 minutes,
but that guideline of making sure that your pain tolerance is at a four out
of ten or less and that you're not in pain the next day or the day after that's going
to be an appropriate amount of run walking for you.
And then over the course of four weeks, what I would do is follow this return
to running program where you're breaking down each run into four chunks and you
start off with in the first week, one chunk is going to be running,
and then the second week, two of the chunks are going to be running.
Third week, three chunks,
and in the fourth week, all four chunks will be running.
And hopefully you are back to running.
I'm going to list out some rules to help frame a return to running protocol.
As we said, the first one continue doing whatever activity you want to do,
as long as the pain is always less than a four out of ten, use that as a guideline
for what activities to do and how long to do those activities.
Also, make sure that you aren't in pain the next day at all.
The third thing is that you have to get into your mind how long it's going to take
for you to really come back from an injury.
And the rule of thumb that I've heard is
roughly take half the length of time that an injury occurred,
that pain was present, and that's roughly how long it's going
to take you to really return to full capacity.
So if you had a pain that is niggling about for twelve months that you didn't
actually take care of, it might take you six months to get back
fully, which is why we want you to get injuries and niggles taken care of early
on and why I set the rule that if you have pain that lasts for three weeks or more,
that's when you want to go to a physiotherapist so that you can get
back to things within a week or two, as opposed to six months,
twelve months or longer once something catastrophic happens.
Finally, what Brody says is to go slow
but not too slow, and address the thing that does cause more pain than that.
Four out of ten. So if it's running and it's running trails
well, strengthen the ankles or strengthen all of the muscles all around the area
that need to be strengthened so you can come back stronger.
Feeling really good. Thank you for watching Motivators.
If you're looking for a training plan
that incorporates these methods that is as good as a one on one coach,
but as inexpensive as doing it yourself, check out our Motive training app
that covers triathlons, running races, duathlon, swim runs, and cycling events.
The link in the description below where
you can check out your customized training plan for free.
Also, if you rather listen to these tips, we also publish these videos is in podcast
format on the Terrence Motive Method podcast, so you can check that out.
And if you don't want to do either
of those things that you found this video helpful, hit us up with a virtual high
five by smashing the like button below later motivators.