How to Train for your Next Event Whilst Minimising Injury

How to train for your next event whilst minimising injury

This blog is a little bit self-inspired, but I think it will be relevant to a lot of you out there that are pushing towards a training or fitness goal and want to make progress whilst keeping your body feeling good, avoiding any major encounters with pain or injury.

Since about October last year, I’ve been hit by the running bug, which I’ve very much enjoyed despite honestly not really doing any running since high school AFL.

This culminated in training for the HBF Half Marathon back in May, which I thoroughly enjoyed and was an achievable challenge. And I’m currently about 10 weeks into my marathon training plan for the Perth Running Festival later in October. I’ve always been into fitness, but never really trained for specific goals or competitions. I’ve previously done CrossFit, strength and conditioning training, general gym work and an 18-month stint of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. But with training consistently for the marathon, I’ve picked up a few niggles. I want to reflect on what could be done better during the training process to minimise injury-related setbacks.

Should training be 100% pain-free?

Whether you’re training for an upcoming Hyrox race, a half marathon, marathon or ultra, triathlon, CrossFit competition, bodybuilding, powerlifting, MMA or jiu-jitsu. If you are working towards a training goal, and you’re currently pushing your body more in terms of your overall training volume and intensity than what you have done previously, being 100% pain-free throughout the prep is probably not realistic. Especially if you have a full-time job to balance, likely family commitments, personal life, etc. There’s going to be a lot on your plate and it all takes recovering from.

Realistic injury expectations during training towards your event

If you’re training five or six hours more a week and pushing progress towards an event more than what you’ve previously trained, you are going to have to expect some niggles along the way.

I think a more realistic expectation in terms of injury management would be to avoid any significant ‘time off’ injuries. Ideally, we want to keep any physical problems to the level where they are not interfering with training, and especially not impacting your day-to-day life outside of training, and you’re able to stay on track with your plan. This is a better goal than avoiding pain altogether.

But how can we optimise our training, injury management and recovery to work towards this?

Proactive injury care and management

Honestly, I feel like in the rehab & injury space, particularly on social media, there’s a lot of hype around ‘injury prevention.’ I just think a lot of the time this is not realistic, and we should be aiming for optimal injury management and minimisation instead.

Aligning yourself with a good allied health provider, like a chiro or a physio who understands your sport and your training goals is key here. Be proactive, either going in for an assessment before anything happens injury-wise, or at the very least, ensure you’re getting on top of any small niggles as soon as they occur.

If we are able to get on pain & injury as soon as they emerge, then we can appropriately manage your training load, manage the treatment and the rehab to ensure that you’re not missing any training time, and more importantly, the injury doesn’t worsen and impact your future training time.

Following a training plan 

This should be an obvious one, but a proper training plan (be it from a run coach, strength coach, CrossFit or Hyrox) is key to sensibly managing and increasing your load. 

An event-specific plan should be tailored so that you are gradually working up to a certain level in terms of fitness and training over time. It should take into account your previous base level of fitness & any previous injuries. Often we see people that want to DIY their training plan and whilst this can work in some cases, when it comes to programming for yourself, it’s too easy to make big jumps in terms of training load just because you’re feeling good, losing track of the bigger picture in terms of load management and proper periodisation training over time.

Incorporating proper prehab, rehab, and accessory training work

This will obviously vary a bit depending on the sport or event you are training for. But in a lot of disciplines, for example running and CrossFit, you need to make sure that you incorporate some prehab – sometimes in the form of extra strength, stability, or accessory work to complement the main movements in which you are trying to progress. Examples of accessory work would be:

• Lateral glute and hip strengthening
• Improving ankle mobility and dorsiflexion
• Plyometric work to improve Achilles capacity
• Spinal mobility work to improve thoracic rotation and extension

While these aren’t going to directly benefit the movements or sports you’re training for in competition, accessory work helps keep the body strong, healthy, and adaptive. Allowing you to get the most out of your event-specific training while helping to minimise any injury. 

Nutrition, rest and recovery

These are the other big rocks when it comes to maximising your training and injury prevention. As chiropractors, we are not specialists in nutrition by any means, but some general advice here should point you in the right direction.

When it comes to food and nutrition, a lot of the time as a society, particularly as active people, we tend to be focused on eating for body composition and fat loss rather than eating for performance and training. If you’re increasing your training loads significantly, especially if you have an active lifestyle or a job which gets your step count up, we need to ensure we’re fueling appropriately. This likely means increasing your protein intake, increasing your carbohydrate intake, and paying special attention to pre- and post-workout nutrition. If you’re in the endurance space, some intra-training nutrition focused on carbohydrates and hydration as well. If this is all very new to you, it might be worth getting a sports nutritionist or dietitian involved. 

When it comes to rest, if you’re training for an event like this, you should really be aiming for a minimum of 7.5, ideally 8+ hours of sleep a night. This is hugely important when it comes to recovery and injury prevention. We have to remember that training is a stressor. While it gives us opportunities to adapt and build back stronger, adding significant stress into your day-to-day load means you need to allow time for recovery. When the balance gets out of whack – too much stress, not enough recovery – we’re more likely to suffer an injury

Need help making it to the finishing line without injury?

As a group of active practitioners ourselves, our team is familiar with how to support you in training for an event while reducing injury. 

Contact us or book online today to get started.

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