Your Marathon Your Physio: When To See A Physio For Your Running Injury

How do I know when to see a physio for my running injury?

In this video Marathon Physio, Lucy Macdonald, explains what type of pain is okay to run through and what sort of pain you should get checked out by a physio. Rest, nutrition and sleep can help you to recover from the normal levels of pain that occur during training. She explains what indicators you can use to assess if your injury needs to be checked out or not. These include pain intensity, localised pain and your general health. 

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, I’m Lucy Macdonald, physiotherapist, and today I’m going to talk to you about what pain is ok to run through and what pain is not ok and needs to be checked out. It’s a super common question that I come across all the time.

There are a few basic principles that should help you to make your decision. The first thing is to understand that training for a marathon is going to be an uncomfortable process, as you’ve possibly already worked out. That discomfort is part of the body adapting to the changes that are required of it in order to become stronger and more resilient and fitter. So, what happens is when you put more strain through the body than it’s used to, you do get a bit of microtrauma, so a little bit of damage to the tissues of the body and the organs of the body. But then the body is able to do this beautiful adaptation process, where it becomes stronger and, as I say, more resilient and fitter.

So, there’s a few things that enable this process to occur. One of them is that you need to have the ingredients in place for recovery. Now in order to recover from that microtrauma, in order to recover from that damage that you’re putting on the body you need to have decent nutrition, you need to rest and you need to sleep. So, all of those things will enable you to then get stronger rather than just remain in pain.

What’s also really important to remember is that if you put too much stress through the body, if you put too much force through the body, instead of just having microtrauma, you’ll actually create so much trauma that you’re then unable to move, to contract the muscles, to train as usual. Then all that happens is a vicious cycle of weakness and pain, and stress and everything’s just heading down in the wrong direction. So how do you know if you’re putting too much strain on the body or if you’re getting it just right?

First things first, look at pain intensity. If your pain is more than about a 3 or 4 out of 10 then that’s too much. So, 10 is the worst pain you can imagine and 0 is nothing. If its more than 3 or 4 out of 10 then you’re overdoing it and you need to really reel things in.

The second thing is if you have localised pain, so in other words if there’s a part of your body that has pain and the rest of the body feels ok, then that’s an indicator that you need to go and see a running physio.

The other element is to look at your general health, are you feeling fatigued all the time? Are you generally getting cold more often than usual? Are you feeling low? Under the weather? Are you feeling depressed or feeling particularly anxious? All those things, that general health component, can be an indicator that you are overdoing it.

So, I hope that’s been helpful, just remember the three main principles. Number 1 – the intensity of the pain shouldn’t be more than a 2 or 3 out of 10, if the pain is localised to one part of the body then you need to see a physio, and number 3 – if you’re generally feeling under the weather consistently then you need to address the amount of load that is going through your body on a regular basis.

So, if you want to ask me any more questions about that, please do get in touch. You can email me directly lucymacdonaldphysio@hotmail.co.uk or securely at lucy@octopusclinic.com. You can follow us on Twitter @octopusclinic, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and I would love to hear suggestions from you about what you would like me to cover next. And in the meantime, happy running!