Three Questions With an Arcadia Professor: College of Health Sciences’ Brian Eckenrode on Avoiding Injuries While Running

Whether you're gearing up for a Thanksgiving Turkey Trot, a 5K, or tackling a marathon, the way you train is key to your success.

We asked Brian Eckenrode, PT, DPT, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Physical Therapy and head of the Arcadia University Running Injury Clinic, to share some tips on how to prepare and recover from a run. Dr. Eckenrode has over 23 years of clinical experience in orthopedics and sports medicine as a physical therapist, which includes working with collegiate, professional, and Olympic level athletes.

What are some common injuries seen in runners? What can be done to prevent those injuries?
Oftentimes, when training for a race, there's a lot of work that's involved, but it has to be done in a sequential way so that everybody's individual body can handle those loads adequately and avoid injury.

Thinking about the muscles and tissue type involved, the most common injuries are typically from overuse and overtraining. The big ones are obviously things that are bone stress injuries, like your stress fractures. Then you have your soft tissue, more muscle and tendon type injuries like tendinopathy. A muscle tear, obviously, would be the most severe. While there's not necessarily a real rhyme or reason for why people get a stress fracture instead of tendinopathy, we see that there's typically some type of overuse piece that is tied to it.

Strength training can be extremely helpful in setting yourself up for running success. At minimum, runners should try for once a week in order to get the tissues conditioned to handle the running load. In addition, from a maintenance standpoint, generalized stretching is important. It might not give you the most instant gratification, but there is absolutely some value in it. Ancillary to those, there are lots of other variables that play a role in being prepared for a race such as sleep, nutrition, and psychological stress.

What can be done during a race to help prevent injuries?
Hopefully, when the runners are at the starting line, they feel ready.

During the race, there are self-checks that runners can do. If a runner is feeling off, should they slow down? Change their form? These are questions they need to ask themselves. If they are starting to feel crampy or thirsty, they are probably already dehydrated, so there needs to be a plan for that too.

The hard thing is that people are very goal-oriented. They want to push themselves, sometimes too hard. That's why there are secondary and tertiary goals.

What advice can you give runners for post-training/post-race recovery?
Again, this becomes an individual experience for each person. For some people, they're completely wiped out and want to take several weeks completely off. For others, they take a couple of days and then start with some cross training, maybe in the pool or on a bike, just something to get moving again.

Certainly though, my advice is to take some time off and recover from the race you just ran. If you have a lingering injury, that would be the time to address it. Otherwise, take some time to enjoy your achievement of completing the race you ran.