Hi there, I'm Lucy MacDonald, physiotherapist. Welcome back to my
virtual clinic. Today I'm going to be talking to you about returning to
running after injury or illness, but before I do I'd like to say thank you
very much to those of you that continue to send me lovely messages of support, I
really appreciate them, please do subscribe and make sure you share these
videos so that as many people as possible can benefit from my advice. So
you're returning to running after you've had to take a period of time off due to
injury or illness or perhaps just lack of motivation or whatever and you want
to get back into running so how do you do it?
The first thing is probably the most obvious, which is don't just go back in
where you left off, so by now your muscles will have become weaker, your
tendons and other structures would have become less resilient and your
heart and your lungs will be less fit, so it's really important that you ease your
way back in gently, otherwise you're just going to end up re-injuring or becoming
ill and you might get even more ill than previously. So how do you do it, how do
you know that you're ready to go back to running? The first thing I would
recommend is that if you can go for a 45 minute brisk walk and you're not too
fatigued afterwards and you don't have any pain, then it's time to start
introducing some run walk intervals, so put on your trainers, put on your running
trainers and go for a brisk walk and see how you feel, if you're feeling fabulous
then I would recommend that you start a run walk interval return. So you start
with a two minute walk and then a one-minute run, a two minute walk and a
one minute run, and you continue to do that for a total of 21 minutes, in
other words you do seven sets of three-minute blocks of those run walks,
you don't do it particularly fast, you do it in a nice steady rate but equally you
don't artificially slow yourself down because that can actually lead
to injury in itself, so just a nice steady pace. When you've done that
21 minutes, as long as you don't have any pain and
you're not feeling fatigued then that's fine. The difference between tiredness
and fatigue is generally that if you feel tired and you go to bed you wake up
in the morning and you feel fresh then that's fine,
if you feel tired, you go to bed, you have a good night's sleep, you wake up and you
still feel tired tired then that's more fatigue and that's not good, so you need
to really reel back the speed of your progress if that's the case. Presuming
everything's good then you can start to play around a bit with those intervals,
so you can start to run nice and steadily for two minutes and then walk
for one minute, run for two, walk for one and again a
maximum of 21 minutes. Now really important if you are progressing from
one level to the next you need to leave two whole days afterwards to make sure
you can really test how your body has responded to that increase, because it
can take up to 72 hours for the body's inflammatory processes to take place, so
you really only know how your body has responded to that extra strain going
through it after 72 hours, so try and leave two whole days between your
running sessions. Now it's really important that as you're returning to
running that you make sure you pay extra attention on your recovery, so things
like nutrition, sleep, managing stress, all of those things are really important
when you are returning to running so please do make sure that you're making
sure that you're eating really well, so plenty of veg, complex carbohydrates,
minimising processed food, minimising sugar, minimising alcohol, smoking, that
kind of thing, so really paying attention to all those things,
likewise sleep. Sleep is when we do a lot of our regeneration and recovery so
paying attention to making sure you get good quality sleep and enough
sleep, we all need at least eight hours a night
so do pay attention to that and do things that you probably already know
about like make sure that you don't use a screen for two hours before bedtime,
have a regular bedtime routine and avoid caffeine in the afternoons and try and
minimise alcohol, because even a tiny bit of alcohol can have a negative effect on
sleep. Last but not least as I mentioned stress, really important to minimise your
stress levels because stress gets in the way of that recovery process. So I hope
that's been helpful, I hope that you enjoy your return to running and I look
forward to hearing from you. If you could let me know how you get on I would be
really appreciative and please do write in the comments below what would you
like me to do a video on next? So until next time, happy running!