Prevention – the best cure for niggles and injuries.

Coach Alan follows up on his recent article which looked at how to work out if something is a niggle or injury by writing about how might you be able to stay ahead of the curve and prevent these niggles or injuries happening at all.

As the saying goes prevention is better than cure! How can we apply that to those niggles and injuries that athletes often experience during training for a triathlon?

First of all, before starting a session think about your current state and approach the session accordingly. Take a moment to do a self-diagnostic check and think back over the last 48 hours of your life and how you have felt, what things have your body told you?

No issues = no editing required.
Stiff, sore or tired be kind to your body and take the next hint seriously.

Warm-Up

If there is one tip I could give to all athletes it would be to warm up properly. But how do you do this? A warm-up aims to prepare the body for exercise and gently get all the required systems up to speed. A warm-up, however, is something that is often done incorrectly.

Our body is extremely clever and has several redundancy systems always at hand to use should an aggressive predator come around the corner. This is our flight or fight system, should we need or decide to run, our body will instantly start to fire up our anaerobic system and adrenaline will be released to rapidly increase our heart rate, but this system comes at a cost. All too often athletes tap into these systems during a warm-up unconsciously below is a three-step process to help you avoid that pitfall.

Warming up for a sunny cross country course interval session in the Algarve.

1. Mobilise

Mobility is the first step in preparing your body for exercise. Proper mobility will allow your body to achieve proper posture, with proper posture comes an increasing likelihood of correct function. Think of this as getting all the electrical wiring in the right place with the switches to turn the lights on where you want them as well. Without the light switch in the right place, you will find it difficult to turn the lights on.

2. Activate

Once your posture is improved you can now turn the muscles on. This is now about pushing the switch, activating muscles can be tricky. The difficulty here is again the amazing ingenuity of our bodies, if one muscle isn’t working as it should another will do its job for it via a compensation mechanism. Again if you need to run away from the predator and your glutes aren’t working another muscle will fill in for them. As athletes, we have to consciously go about overcoming this compensation and deliberately firing the correct muscles.

Sometimes with activation, the wiring can be a little bit dodgy and it can take some time for brain and muscles to form a strong connection and then also a strong consistent firing. Changes in this area will take time and work to see a delayed gratification/performance further down the line when lots of repetitions of good function have been laid down.

3. Romance

All of the above need to be incorporated into an overall approach this can be summed up as ‘romancing the body’ into a session. I recently came across this analogy in listening to a podcast with Gerry Rodrigues and Jim Vance and it works well. If you have a challenging session to do you need to take the time to romance your body through a warm-up rather than jumping straight into the session and going all out from the gun. Be careful and be considerate as to how your body feels and what the session requires of it.

Do you romance your body into training sessions? This analogy helps us to consciously slow down during a warm-up, it is really important to do this and make a conscious decision to do this and take the warm-up seriously. Engaging in this process rather than dismissing or overlooking the importance of a warm-up is key.

Post-session

As from my tip in my earlier blog, record and note any sensations or issues, start to tune into your body by learning the specific areas in which you have frequent difficult you are already highlighting a possible area for not only management and prevention but also performance improvement. Your body has a team of systems and muscles and as the saying goes a team is only as strong as its weakest link. It is important to add, that through this process you are also not only raising red flags of warning but also pouring water on red herrings it is very easy to overthink and worry about some sensations in training that are normal, remember some short term struggle is part of training when planned.

Hot Spot Awareness

There are also several areas that we commonly come across as coaches that are worth deliberate management these being;

Feet
Hips
Quads
Upper back

All of these areas are used in all of the disciplines in some form but affect each to a different degree and impact in a different way.

Swimming is predominantly affected by our hands being in front of us tapping away at a keyboard. Gradually over time, this tightens our chest muscles and switches off our upper back muscles. This rolling forward of the shoulders can increase the incidence of shoulder injuries as our upper back muscles switch off and stiffen up.

Mobilising your chest and shoulders pre-swim in combination with activating upper back muscles will help to combat this lifestyle effect.

Cycling we spend all of our time sitting and then sit some more in conjunction with a highly repetitious action in a fixed state which leads to a high build-up of load in very specific locations.

Stretching after long or highly intense cycling sessions is key to combatting this and maintaining mobility for…

Running if there is one discipline in which you need to take your warm-ups very seriously this is it! Running is renown for having the highest incident of injury across the three disciplines. An excellent range of movement in our hips is required to run well and it may not have slipped your attention that our lifestyle and cycling hinder this mobility.

Before running focus on gaining mobility head to toe with a warm-up that also challenges your balance. Key to this is mobilising your hips externally (knee out to the side) hurdle steps are a great way to do this.
Focus on increasing mobility in our anterior chain, that being our quadriceps and hip flexors.
Plus activate the muscles we do want to work our posterior chain, gluteals, hamstrings, calves.

Prevention

The cure for many little niggles is conscious management and pro-active plans that help to facilitate training in the best possible condition. By being aware, organised and disciplined in applying relative small routines to your training you will not only avoid niggles and injuries but also increase your likelihood of improving the effectiveness of your function and technique which may also lead to the performance improvements that also come from building up a log of consistent training over the medium to long term. Doing all of these little things can lead to big results but it requires patience, belief and diligence to earn some delayed gratification.

#believestriveachieve

We’re here to help

Tri Training Harder are one of the leading Triathlon coaching providers in the UK, using our wealth of experience to unite scientific and technological research with already well-established and successful best practices, to create a formula for triathlon and endurance coaching that works.

The result is an honest, dynamic, yet simple new way of constructing an athlete’s training to allow them to reach their potential.

If you’re planning your next season, just starting out in the sport or are looking for extra guidance at the very top end of the field, we are here to help, and our coaches would be delighted to hear from you. You can contact us via the website, and one of the team will be in touch.

Alan WardNovember 2, 2020Alan Ward, Injury, TrainingComment

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