Training For Sports Performance…With All The Wrong Info!

I just received a call from a gentleman who was referred to me because of some issues he was having with his running.  He informed me that he had a calf strain (gastrocnemius) for the past 3-months and has not be able to properly train.  He said that physical therapy did not help and he really doesn’t know what to do from here.

I asked him many questions and came to the conclusion that he was working towards optimizing his performance (5K runner) with lots of bad information.  The unfortunate part is that the bad information came from three sources that we would consider to be “professionals”, yet they all dropped the ball:

The Coach (I use that term lightly)

He told me that while he was training he informed his running coach several times that his hip and knees were hurting (6-days a week of running tends to do that to people).  His coach replied, “If you want to be a great runner, you need to get used to that.” I will go out on a limb here and say this coach doesn’t understand the stress of training or how to appropriately progress a training program and develop an athlete.  That is horrible advice!

Being in pain is different than being sore.  If you are in pain you need to determine what you are doing wrong.  If you are overly sore, then you need to address your recovery and regeneration strategies.

The Doctor

After he strained the calf, he went to the doctor who found nothing wrong under MRI.  So, the doctor’s recommendation was to “do nothing and rest”.  Unfortunately, when we do nothing with this sort of injury, two things happen:

a) We become deconditioned.  I would have been trying to train the upper body and trying to maintain work capacity instead of sitting around.  The one thing I know about runners is that when they get injured they do nothing.  When they come back from the injury, in their deconditioned state, they try and jump right back in at the intensity and volume that they were doing previous to the injury.  No good can come of this!  Maintain work capacity.  Find a way to train around the injury or (more importantly) train some of the possible factors that caused the injury as the site and the source of the problem are rarely the same thing.

b) The strained/torn muscle starts to lay down scar tissue and becomes stiff.  This doesn’t mean that you should go in and start doing tons of direct soft tissue work or trying to get the muscle to move agressively.  You should however do some light soft tissue work to get the lymph and blood flow moving, do more specific soft tissue work on other areas up or down the chain (remember, the site and the source of the problem are rarely the same thing) and encourage pain free ROM once inflammation and swelling have come down.  Don’t just sit there and let the tissue get stiff and allow a mass amount of scar tissue to form.

The Physical Therapist

After meeting with the doctor and doing nothing for awhile, he decided to try out physical therapy.  He told me that all they did were some exercises that made the area more irritated and painful.  I asked him if they did any specific soft tissue work and he said after he had been going there for 3-weeks they started to do some soft tissue massage and then told him that he could just go out and start running a little bit.  So of course (see above about runners coming back from injuries) he took that to mean he could start training normally again and jumped right in running 5-days a week.  Because of this he has not be able to do anything for several weeks due to pain.  Why the physical therapist did not start with soft tissue therapy right away, I don’t know and why the therapist did not instruct the guy on proper progression back to running is totally beyond me (my best guess would be the therapist has no clue about running, periodization, program design or training in general).

Long story short, he has a long road back.  I know he can get there, but it will take some time to undo what has already been done.  We talked a bit about some of the things that I do at my facility – sports specific strength and conditioning, soft tissue therapy, etc – and how I think I could best help him out with his program design.  We’ll see what happens.

If you feel you are in the same boat as this gentleman and looking to optimize your performance on the field of play, feel free to shoot me an email: patrick@optimumsportsperformance.com

Patrick