PAIN IN RUNNING. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

Chuang Tzu defines pain as "the penalty for violating the principle of nature". And what is the main goal in nature? - Survival. How does it apply to biological systems? It works through fear and pain, where soreness is an early warning, helping the body to recognize danger, necessary to avoid in order to survive.

Pain is confirmation of our fear, it signals us that we are doing something wrong and need to stop and change something. Certainly, fear could appear even without any pain, just in anticipation of getting it, and prevent us from any activity in this direction. Thus, pain is the evidence that you got where you are not supposed to be. It means that your body is over the boundaries of its own abilities to deal with surrounding. There are different degrees of deviation from these boundaries. After some of them, the body could still return to its normal condition, but after others you get pain and damage of the body's tissues, when their functions are destroyed (muscle and tendon tears, for example).

The explanation here is simple: pain signals the stop of energy transformation through the body. The causes for it could be different: from mechanical to mental, but the final application of it is our body. So when it hurts in your muscles, ligaments, or tendons, the reasons for this could be numerous: from wrong thinking, feeling, perception to the incorrect use of forces, muscle efforts and wrong movement as a whole.

So you are hurting! You need to figure out which pattern is leading you to pain. Wrong thinking by itself doesn't lead to wrong movement, unless it connects, directs and reinforces the wrong movement .Then you need to correct it. You need to know exactly in which direction your body is supposed to move and how to not stop this movement by improper thinking, feeling, and applying your efforts. You need to know the standards and simple operational rules to work with. Here they are:

• Do not stop movement - redirect it
• Do not create leverages - avoid them
• Do not increase efforts - minimize them
• Do not fight gravity - assist it and manifest it in your movement

For example, you think that heel striking is the way to run and you deliberately land on your heels. What does it do? You land in front of the body and brake the body's movement forward. So the mechanical load goes into your body and hit one of the links of the whole chain - your foot, knee, hip, or low back. In this particular case, it is usually the knee which gets the most impact and you start hurting there. It could be the lateral, medial or front side of the knee, which depends on exact direction of the load or on where the body movement is stopped.

My point here is to give you an idea on how to recognize through pain location your running technique errors and how to learn to correct them in a practical way. The full description of this topic will be published as a separate book on running technique errors and injuries.

Dr.Romanov