Your Marathon Your Physio: Muscle Injuries

Muscle Injuries

In this video Marathon Physio, Lucy Macdonald, explains why muscle injuries occur during training. She describes the reasons why this might happen – ramping up your running too quickly, running technique and if your muscles aren’t strong enough to handle this load. She also recommends what your running physio should be looking at.

Get in contact

You can contact Lucy directly on lucymacdonaldphysio@hotmail.co.uk, via this website (where you can also find lots of free running exercise videos) and on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

If you would like to book an appointment, please click on this link.

Video transcription:

Hi there, I’m Lucy Macdonald, physiotherapist, and I am going to talk to you today about muscle injury, because I’ve had lots of enquiries recently so I thought it’d be useful for you at this stage.

So, muscles become injured simply because they are having to deal with load that is excessive, so load that they’re not able to cope with, and as a result the fibres within those muscles break. Now there are a number of different reasons for that happening. One could be that you’re simply ramping up your running too quickly. Another could be that your running technique is such that you’re loading those muscles excessively, so your muscles are trying to do something that they’re not designed to do. Perhaps they’re taking on the role of other muscles, perhaps other muscles are weak and therefore the muscle that’s now damaged has been trying to compensate for those other weak muscles. The other one could simply be that the strength of the muscle that’s damaged has not been developed enough for it to handle the amount of load, the amount of running that you’re doing.

So, I would recommend that when you see a running specific physio that they look at a number of different things. So, that they look particularly at your training programme and they make adjustments to that, that they look at your running biomechanics, so they look at your technique, how you’re moving your body, how you’re running, either outside or on a treadmill, and also to look at the strength of your muscles. Those three components are really, really important and then it’s important that they actually give you things to address those things. That they give you very clear guidelines of what you should be doing with your training programme, they give you very clear tips and give you running drills, and make changes to your running technique according to what they find, and that they give you exercises working on not just the strength of the muscle that is injured, which is very important, but also strengthening the surrounding muscles so that they can take some of the load instead of the injured one.

So those three super important things. I hope that that is useful. Please do get in touch with me if you have any problems and you would like some advice. You can contact me directly on lucymacdonaldphysio@hotmail.co.uk or securely at lucy@octopusclinic.com. You can follow me on social media, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, @octopusclinic. I would love to hear what you would like me to talk about next so please do drop me a message or put something in the comments below. And in the meantime, happy running!