Hi there, I'm Lucy Macdonald, physiotherapist. Welcome back to my
virtual clinic. Today I'm going to be showing you the best exercises for
runners so if you're a runner please do carry on watching this video, if you're
not then check out the other videos that I've got in various different playlists
on my youtube channel, but today we're going to talk about exercises for
runners, I'd just like to say thank you very much to those of you that keep
sending me lovely messages of support I really appreciate them, so top exercises
for runners can be divided into three main groups, the first is the movement
patterning or technique side of things, the second is strength and conditioning
and the third is stretching and I'm gonna show you all three of those
categories right now, so first things first the Running Man exercise, now if
you want to look at these exercises in more detail please do go to our website
octopusclinic.com and check out the video section where you will find in
great detail all of these exercises and I'll put the links below this video so
Running Man first of all standing on your, on one
leg with the other leg behind you, you want to be making sure as you look in
front of the mirror or looking down at your leg that your knee is going over
the centre of your foot, you want to be making sure that your weight is on the
front of the standing foot, the front leg, and then you want to make sure that
you're able to stabilise and keep your shoulder, your hip, your knee and your
foot all aligned as you then move your opposite leg forwards and backwards
and as you can see if you're feeling particularly coordinated you can add
your arms but the absolute key is that you're working the stability on this
side and you might start to feel a discomfort in your buttock that's
absolutely fine presuming that you have no hip pain at any other time, but if you
have pain anywhere else please do stop the exercise and make
sure you get it checked out, so the next exercise that I'd recommend is all about
what we call proprioception which is your body's positional sense, in other
words the sense that enables you to know what your body is doing
without you looking at it and the best way of training that is to close your
eyes because if you close your eyes then you take out your vision's contribution
to your balance system, so making sure that you've got your hands somewhere
that can support you if you need it you simply stand on one leg and you close
your eyes and you try and balance on one leg, some people will find that
significantly easier than others but wherever you're at you just practice it
now when that becomes easy you can add a little bit of movement so you can add
some knee bends with your eyes closed, some arm reaches, some head swings but
please do make sure that you hold on to something so that you don't fall over, so
that's number two, number three is all about strengthening the muscles on the
outside of the buttock that helps to keep that alignment and that running
technique right, now for this you need a squidgy ball like a Pilates ball like
this one and you take the ball and you put it between your knee and the wall,
then you bend your knees, you're welcome to hold on for a bit of support as you
do it, bend your knees open your knees, tip your body, lift your
leg and hold and when you're holding it you should feel the discomfort in your
buttock because that's the muscle that's working really hard, and then from that
position you can do mini knee bends, now I've made that look ridiculously easy it
is a very difficult exercise so that one in particular please do go to the
website octopusclinic.com and make sure you watch the wall ball series so
that you can really get it right, okay so that's my top three movement patterning
exercises, my second set is all about strength and conditioning so you're
probably going to be more familiar with some of these exercises, you put one leg
in front of the other, you have your legs about hip width apart and then you
slowly lower yourself down on the back leg so that you've got most of your
weight going through that back leg and then you come back up, now if that's easy
if you can do 30 reps of those with no problems then you can add a little bit
of weight in your hands, so I put a little weight in my hands, arms out in
front of me and then I'm going to twist to my front leg, I'll show you again, come
down, arms out, twist back, now again if you're not sure how to do that one then
please do go and check it out it's called a split squat so go and have a
look on our website and I talk you through in more detail there, the next
one is all about those calf muscles so first thing to do is to make sure that
you're getting your ankle alignment right when you're doing calf raises and
heel drops, so in front of the mirror make sure that when you go up onto your
toes you're bringing your weight onto the balls of your feet not
the outsides of your feet so make sure as you go up there when you're looking
in the mirror that you can't see your heel bones behind your feet and when
you've got that, and that's exercise 42 on our website, when you've got that
alignment right then you can do them off the edge of a step, so the reason it's
important to do them off the edge of a step is that then you get the full range
of motion that's required for running so nice and slowly down all the way down
through the full range with your knees nice and soft and then all the way up
again, so that's my second one, and my third one is core, now
the best things for your core muscles are things like on our website the
Superman exercises, the foam roller exercises but also things like
planking, now when you're planking what you've got to make sure is that you make
sure that your back is in the correct position otherwise your back will
start to hurt so make sure that you always maintain a small curve in your
lower back when you're doing your planking, don't completely flatten your
back, last but not least stretches so my top three stretches are quad stretches
number one most obvious of course they'll hurt and be sore after you've
been running so you take your knees together at the front there you take
your heel to your bottom like that bring your leg back
and hold it there for about 30 seconds and then repeat three times on both
sides, key things with those is to keep your knees together and bring your leg
backwards so that you feel the stretch throughout the front of the thigh, my
other area that I would strongly recommend that you stretch is your
upper back because often if you don't keep your upper back really mobilised
then your neck and your lower back can become sore so there's some exercises on
the website called the simple chair twists they're
brilliant but also you can do an exercise we call thread the needle where
you go onto your hands and knees, this is the needle, here's the eye of the, here's
the hole that I'm putting the needle through so we're going to put the thread
through the eye of the needle and we're going to stretch that way, so this one on
the website is called thread the needle that's a brilliant one for really
mobilising your back really nicely and then last but not least stretching out
your glutes so I'm sure you all know different ways of stretching your glutes
but my favourite ones involve lying on the back, taking the knees to the chest
or doing this kind of thing and again holding for about 30 seconds and it's
really important that you only ever do stretches at the end of your exercise,
it's really important that you don't do them before or during because that's just
when your muscles are wanting to to get going and stretching slows down that
ability to contract, so there are my favourite exercises for runners, I
hope that that's been helpful, please do press that big subscribe key and I look
forward to hearing all your suggestions of what you'd like me to do a video on
next, happy running, bye!