Running Smart With Tips to Keep You Moving: Injury-free!

A running coach, with an outstanding YouTube channel, shares with you the Top Five blunders to avoid - that will allow you to have an injury-free.

The running coach is Nick Bester. He shares with you ways to train smarter, not harder. Here’s to an injury-free, faster, and more fit.

Mistake #1: Doing too many runs at the same pace

If you want to improve your running, you should try to incorporate at least two hard days into your weekly training. On these days, you are breaking out of your comfort zone, and this is when the magic happens.

But on your other days, make sure you run more easy.

This will allow your body to rebuild stronger. If you push the pace on your easy/recovery days, you’ll spoil the significant improvement that you were supposed to get!

Run easy on your easy days. Don’t worry about what others will think on Strava. 

Mistake #2: Neglecting Your Strength and Conditioning

This is something that I’ll need to start doing, along with you, in the coming weeks and months.

Maintaining and building your muscles is an essential element of staying injury-free in the coming year. If you only focus on running and neglect giving love to your weaker areas, it will likely be a matter of time before something breaks down.

Coach Nick encourages you and me to do two weighted strength sessions a week. There are excellent exercises that can help you avoid injury, such as jump squats, jumping lunges, and calf raises.

Nick encourages us to do these every single day.

Mistake #3: Doing Speed workouts and running higher mileage - too soon!

Your body can do amazing things - If you take your time and allow it to adapt slowly to the contact sport of running. Many people think of football, hockey, or rugby as contact sports. Running is also a contact sport. It wreaks havoc on your legs, tendons, shins, knees, and IT bands. You have to introduce small amounts of running slowly. Take your time to build on the mileage. The more you’re patient, the less chance you’ll get an injury that will knock out your hard-earned fitness. It can take a while to adapt to improvements in your running - it doesn’t just happen overnight. On many occasions, I’ve seen athletes start to follow structured training, see drastic improvements, and then ramp things up too quickly, eventually resulting in an injury.

Coach Nick encourages us to train smart and not get carried away. Remember to increase the volume or quality of your training or mileage by no more than 10% from the week before. This reduces your chance of getting injured.

Mistake #4: Not practicing with Nutrition and Gels during training

When it comes to race day, you never want to be trying something new. For eventual runs longer than 90 minutes, you’ll need to fuel your body with food/and/or gels. Find out what works best for you on your training runs - before race day.

Mistake #5: Getting obsessed with social media

This has been my kryptonite.

I do the awful thing of comparing my runs and pace to those of other talented runners in our area, who are younger and have been putting in the hard work that has given them great fitness and a fast pace.

Remember. Consistent running will enable you to grow and improve your speed. Don’t let the mistake of comparing yourself to others demoralize you.

Check out these tips and other great running topics on Coach Nick Bester's YouTube Channel.