I'm really excited that we’ve finally added an injury prevention plan for runners to the Exakt
Health app. The plan is absolutely free to use and to download, and it doesn't just focus on
the muscles in your legs; it also focuses on your core muscles, includes exercises
for balance and control, as well as flexibility. Now, in this video, I'm going to explain how all
these different exercises help to prevent injury. Also, how you can use the app and how it provides
feedback to help you decide when to progress your exercises and what exercises to do and how
to plan your week. But if you're not interested in watching a video and you just want to get started
with the app and play with it, you can download it for free from the Android store or the Apple store
or, if you click on the link in the description of this video, it will take you directly to the store
where you can download it. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Maryke. I'm one of the
physiotherapists from sports-injury-physio.com, where you can get online physiotherapy assessment
as well as treatment for your injuries. Now, roughly two years ago, I teamed up with a German
tech company with the aim to develop an app that can provide physiotherapy treatment for runners
quickly and efficiently and allow everybody to get access to high-quality treatment when they
need it. So, the first thing that most people know about these days is that strength training
can help prevent injuries. It does this in a few different ways. The first is, strength training
makes everything in your body more robust. We tend to just think about muscles getting stronger and
bigger when we do strength training, but actually it also strengthens your ligaments, strengthens
your tendons, and it helps to activate your nerve endings and get better nerve supply and blood
supply to those muscles and other structures. So, it's a really nice all-rounder. But if we think of
more things than just increasing the capacity or the strength of the tissue: When we run,
all our structures in our bodies take a little bit of strain; that's normal, it's impact activity.
And it's actually brilliant, because it stimulates our bones to grow stronger and our muscles to get
stronger and everything. But now, your joints are not meant to take all the strain; your muscles are
meant to absorb large amounts of the strain. If you have a weakness somewhere, or your muscles
aren't quite as strong as they should be, your joints have to take more of the strain, and your
ligaments as well, and that can cause injuries with those. But also, if your muscles aren't
that strong or your nervous system is not that alert, it may actually cause you to also sprain
joints more easily because your control isn't that great. So, strength training is a brilliant way of
improving all of those things. But then there's another type of exercise that can be useful,
and these are balancing exercises or exercises that develop your position sense. If you're
wondering what position sense is: You know, when you close your eyes, you know exactly where your
fingers are, where your toes are. Or when you run down stairs, you don't actually have to look at
the stairs to go down; you can do it without tripping over. That's position sense. It's
basically the brain's ability to know exactly where your body is and how fast it is moving,
to control your movements without you having to look at it. Now, balancing exercise is one way to
develop your position sense. But actually, if you do your regular strength training exercises with
good control and focusing on how you do it, it's also been shown to develop your position sense.
And good position sense has been shown to help you avoid injuries like ankle sprains, for instance.
Then lastly, the third type of exercise people usually include, and we've also included that
in the app, is flexibility or mobility exercises. Now, the research shows that
routine stretching – so, every time you exercise, you stretch, or daily stretching – that doesn't
actually prevent injuries. But there is research that shows that if you have reduced mobility in
certain parts of your body, like, for instance, ankle dorsiflexion, where you pull your toes back,
that can predispose you to specific types of injuries. For ankle dorsiflexion;
that's one of the risk factors for getting patellar tendinopathy.
So, although you don't have to be really rigorous with your stretching, it's good
to every now and again just check in and see, “Have I got optimal mobility in all my muscles?”
Also, you don't have to be as flexible as a gymnast. And to be honest, overstretching muscles
and really trying to do deep, hard stretches can often cause injuries even. Like, high hamstring
tendinopathy is a typical one that develops when people overstretch their hamstrings. So, it's all
about getting the balance right and just making sure that you've got enough range of movement
to comfortably move through the type of sport you want to do or the type of running you want to do.
Most runners these days know that they should be doing some sort of injury prevention programme,
especially older runners. But it's not always easy to know what exercises to do, when to do them,
how many repetitions to do. When are you ready to progress them? Are you doing enough?
So, when we designed the Exakt Health app, we designed it with all of this in mind to make
it as easy as possible for people to know exactly what they have to do. So, the prevention plan in
the app has three stages, so that it doesn't matter if you're new to strength training,
it doesn't matter if you're quite experienced with strength training; there's a level that will be
right for you to start on. And then, we've also included progression questions and tests so that,
if you feel you're ready to move on to the next level, you know exactly what criteria
and boxes you should be ticking before you can go up a level. But also just between workouts,
the app asks you about how difficult you found the exercises, if there were any problems;
and it uses that information to then suggest what level to train on the next time. Now, you
always have autonomy over it, so you can decide, "Naah! I don't want to make it harder. I like how
it is,” and just stay at that level, or you can say, “Yeah, I accept your suggestion; let's make
it a bit harder next time.” Lastly, I would love to ask you for feedback. So, we've designed this
app and we obviously think that it's cool and it's useful, but we do need feedback from true runners
now to tell us that we've hit the spot. So, you can give us feedback either through the app
or you can do it via the Exakt Health website; there's a form to fill in. Or you can also just
email us. But yes, any suggestions, anything that annoys you, anything that you find is missing,
or anything that you truly like and would like to see more of; we would like all of
that type of feedback, because essentially, we just want it as useful as it can be.