Coach Tip Tuesday: The Best Way to Avoid Injury

Injury.  It’s every endurance athlete's worst nightmare.

In addition to sidelining athletes from training for their goals, injuries also tend to rob endurance athletes of their sense of identity.  I have seen first-hand how not training for a goal can cause listlessness within athletes.  But if athletes are robbed of the ability to even exercise (remember: exercise and training are two different things), then that can cause a full-on identity crisis.

Whether they are fully conscious of it or not, movement is an essential part of an athlete’s life.  And like so many things, the absence of something - in this case, movement, training, or exercise - can throw its importance into harsh perspective and leave athletes confronting the reality of just how much of their sense of identity, physical health, and mental health is directly linked to their ability to do workouts.  As such, avoiding injury is monumentally important.  But how do we actually avoid injury?

Listen to Your Body: This is The Way

Over the course of my time as an endurance athlete and coach, I have seen my fair share of injuries, both in myself and in the athletes I coach.  In fact, getting injured is the number one catalyst for an athlete to reach out to me and seek out coaching services.  Injuries (and the downtime and missed goals that they cause) often prompt athletes to seek out the wisdom of an experienced coach who can help them navigate the rehabilitation of their injury and their path forward in endurance sports beyond it.

After so many years of walking alongside athletes who have had a wide variety of injuries and  after navigating my own injuries over the years, I now believe I can say with confidence that I know the best way to avoid injuries.  It’s simple advice.  But, as I often say, just because it’s simple doesn’t mean that it’s easy advice to follow:

Listen to your body.

YOU Are The Secret Sauce

A lot of companies, influencers, and even coaches will try to sell you on a wide variety of products and services that they claim are the secret sauce to preventing injuries.  And while there are certainly some tools and services out there that help the body recover, adapt to training, and therefore help reduce the risk of injury, I have yet to find something that works better at avoiding injuries than an athlete themselves.

Because that’s what we’re talking about here.  Listening to your body is effectively relying on your own self to determine what is going on in your own body.  And while listening to your body is so incredibly effective, it isn’t something that can be packaged, marketed, or sold, so it’s not discussed - let alone touted - as much as it should be.  Do you really think that there is any human, any product, or any service in the world that can do that job for you better than you can?  Does any other person on the planet know you better than you know yourself?

What might be true is that you need to learn how to clearly, honestly, and effectively listen to your body.  But based on what I’ve observed over the last 15+ years that I’ve been an endurance athlete and coach, an athlete who is fully able to harness this power of listening to their body is unstoppable and remains injury-free longer than athletes who don’t take the time to learn how to listen to their body and/or who try to shortcut or avoid learning this by buying every product or service on the market that claims to be able to prevent injury.  The body is always giving us cues as we move through our lives and our training.  It is up to us to pay attention to them and to listen to what they are saying if we want to be healthy and to achieve our goals.

Will listening to your body keep you injury-free for your entire life.  Sadly, it won’t.  Nothing will.  But listening to your body will help you avoid injuries more than anything else can or will, and it’s for that reason that I advocate so strongly for it.

Why Listening to Your Body is Hard

Athletes often struggle with listening to their body, much like they struggle with training by effort (aka Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE)).  One major reason why these two things are so challenging for athletes is that they are both intangible.

In our current world, we are absolutely bombarded by data.  Many companies, influencers, and coaches out there claim that we can measure and quantify anything and everything about endurance sports.  But the hard truth is this: Some of the most meaningful things in the world - and by extension, in the world of endurance sports - are things that we cannot quantify in a tangible way.  

Intangibles hold immense value, and since so many athletes don’t actually take the time to acknowledge let alone appreciate that, the athletes who do learn to both appreciate intangibles and to harness them effectively have a superpower when compared with their peers.  From the outside, no one will be able to tell that you’re doing something so important and significant.  But internally, the difference that an athlete who is listening to their body feels (and then therefore the difference in how an athlete absorbs training and performs in training and racing) is real and can be felt on a deeply personal level even if it cannot be measured by a fitness tracker or other device and/or shared tangibly with another human.

Additionally, athletes have a hard time listening to their bodies because it’s not uncommon for the body and the mind to be speaking different languages.  The body might very well be saying “I need rest!” or “This isn’t the right time for me to train for this goal!” when the mind is saying “I want to do this!” or “Come hell or high water, I’m doing this!”

It’s hard to hear something that you don’t want to hear.  The mind and the heart want what they want; we want what we want.  As a culture and society, we have also glorified pain and suffering so much that athletes think that both are necessary components of their training as well as components of training that are worthy of celebration and praise.  (If you don’t think we’ve done this, look no further than sayings such as “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and to how many athletes have created “Pain Caves” in their houses where they train.)  The combination of us wanting what we want alongside our belief that suffering and pain are normal, essential, and praise-worthy parts of training has created a perfect storm that makes it very challenging for athletes to accurately listen to what their body is saying to them.

My experience has been that it’s not uncommon for athletes to interpret or morph what their body is saying so that it is in alignment with what they want in their minds and in their hearts.  Here are some of the most common variations of those interpretations that I’ve heard over the years:

• “I think I’ll be fine.”
• “I hope I’ll be fine.”
• “This isn’t that big of a deal.”
• “I am tough.”
• “I don’t want to miss a workout.”
• “It’ll be okay.”
• “I haven’t ever been injured before.”
• “This isn’t an injury.”
• “This won’t turn into an injury.”

When this happens, athletes are hearing what they want to hear, not what is actually being said by their body.  And I can tell you that every single time I’ve done this (heard what I wanted to hear from my body instead of what it was actually telling me), I’ve gotten injured.  And when athletes who I have coached have done this, they have also gotten injured.  Ignoring what your body is telling you and pushing forward anyway is a guaranteed recipe for an injury.

The Body Will Tell you When Your Load Has Exceeded Your Capacity

All injuries are the result of an imbalance of load vs. capacity.  (In many cases, it’s a mismanagement of load vs. capacity that creates this imbalance.)  Load refers to the stress placed on the body, especially the musculoskeletal tissues.  Load is seen in the form of training volume, as well as frequency, intensity, and time spent exercising.  Capacity is how much stress a tissue or body part can withstand before degeneration, snapping, or breaking.  Capacity also refers to an athlete’s emotional capacity for training.  But for the purposes of this discussion - where we are discussing how critical it is to listen to the body - we are primarily talking about an athlete’s physical capacity vs. the physical load that is being imposed on it in training.

I can’t tell you how many times an athlete has said to me, “This injury came out of nowhere!”  In many cases, I declare shenanigans when I hear this.  Why?  Because most of the time, the body will give you signals before something becomes a big issue or a fully-developed injury; it is exceedingly rare that an injury actually comes out of “nowhere”.  These signals are the warning signs telling you that danger is looming, and if you’re not paying attention to them (for whatever reason - you’re distracted, you’re in denial, you don’t know how to pay attention to them, etc.), you won’t have a chance to manage whatever is going on before it becomes a fully-developed injury.  

One of the more deceptive parts of injuries is that they can (and often do) take a long time to fully manifest and develop, which means that many athletes don’t see the very real connection between their choices and their injuries.  For instance, a decision that an athlete makes to ignore what their body is saying on a given day may not present as a poor decision exactly on that day.  That decision - likely in combination with several other decisions to ignore what the body is saying made over the course of days, weeks, months, or even years - will snowball into an injury.  And when the body is finally screaming at the athlete (versus the original whispered signals the body was trying to give), the athlete thinks that the injury just appeared out of nowhere.  But it didn’t; the injury is the result of a series of choices to ignore what the body was trying to communicate over a period of time.

While injuries do happen - and, unfortunately, they always will - they don’t always need to happen.  There are many times when it is possible to manage something enough that it either doesn’t turn into an injury or so it doesn't turn into as big of an injury.  Modifying variables in a training schedule such as volume, intensity, frequency, workout type, etc. can all have a positive effect on mitigating injuries from turning into fully-developed injuries that cause athletes to have setbacks in their training and performance.

Speaking from my own personal experience again, there have been many times (especially when I was a newer athlete) when the warning signs my body was giving me were inconvenient or otherwise annoying enough that I just wouldn’t or didn’t want to listen to them.  (Raise your hand if you resemble this.)  If we’re all being honest here, if we really think back on any injuries we have had (that were not the result of acute trauma such as an accident), we all will likely see that our injuries happened because we were being stubborn and not listening to the dozens - if not hundreds - of warning signs we got in advance of the injury becoming fully-developed.

How to Listen to Your Body

Athletes who struggle with how to effectively listen to their body can really benefit from working with a coach, as a coach can help athletes recognize the signs and signals that their body is giving them.  I help the athletes I coach learn and develop the self-awareness to listen to their bodies on their own (aka without needing another person like me to nudge them in the right direction).  

One of the first ways I help athletes to do this is to point out when an athlete is listening to their mind and not their body.  (These are hard conversations to have, but they are so important since they are in the best interests of the athlete.)  I can often detect when an athlete is doing this via the athlete's communication (or, in some cases, the athlete’s lack of communication) and by observing and getting to know the athlete over time as our coach-athlete relationship develops.

Another way I can tell that an athlete isn’t listening to their body is if they never miss a workout or if they are resistant to modifications to their schedule (especially if they are resistant to modifications that include skipping workouts or eliminating workouts).  This might sound paradoxical or counterintuitive, especially since I am always talking about how important consistency is in training.  Consistency is one of the most important aspects of training.  That is true, and it’s true that we cannot predict the future with 100% accuracy, and therefore, it’s true that things change in ways we can’t and don’t expect them to.  

No training plan as it is originally written should be completed exactly as it was written because there’s no possible way for us to know what is actually going to happen in our lives in a week, let alone 4-6 months into the future.  We can make very educated guesses about what will happen, but we never actually know what the future holds.  You could get sick.  Your kid could get sick.  You could have to stay late at work.  You could get stuck in traffic.  You get the idea.

If an athlete never misses or modifies a workout or if they rearrange their schedule so that they “check the box” and don’t miss a workout (aka move workout from one day that doesn’t work for them to a different day just so they can complete it and not miss it), that is one of the loudest signals that they are not listening to their body.  I am just as concerned about athletes who never miss workouts as I am about athletes who are inconsistent and miss too many workouts.  There’s a “Goldilocks” balance here, and that balance comes from listening to your body and writing appropriate training for you based on what the body is communicating.

All athletes - whether they are working with a coach or not - can benefit from acknowledging that they might not currently be where they actually want to be.  But the only way to get where you want to go is to start where you are.  And one of the ways you learn where you are (where you actually are) is by listening to your body.  Here are some common signals that the body will send in advance of an injury fully developing:

• Pain with activity (especially that increases over a workout or lingers after a workout)
• Higher-than-normal levels of fatigue (such as not feeling rested after a sufficient amount of sleep or feeling tired for many (3+) days in a row)
• Feeling that your easy workouts are more taxing on you than they should be
• Mood changes (such as being irritable or short with those in your family or your inner circle)
• An inability to maintain mechanics and form during a workout
• A plateau or backward slide in your performance in workouts or races
• A change in motivation to do workouts or engage in training

Many times, these signals are the body saying that whatever you’re doing is too much or that the body needs more rest.  We want and love to think that we’re invincible, that injuries are things that only happen to other athletes, that we will sleep or rest when we’re dead, and that we are the exception to the rules.  But unfortunately, that’s not how odds work, and we are not different from everyone else.  We have real limits on how much we can actually do, both in our lives and in our training and racing, and sometimes we may need to admit that what we want isn’t what we can currently do.

One of the most important steps in learning to actually listen to the body is to recognize when you are being stubborn or when you are in a state of denial.  (Spoiler: If you don’t think you are doing either of these things, there’s probably a really good chance that you are.)  Challenge yourself.  Question yourself.  Be curious about what you’re experiencing and feeling.  If you find yourself rationalizing a choice, defending what you’re doing, or never missing a workout, these are all warning signs that you might be failing to accurately listen to your body.  

Here are some adaptations that you may need to make in response to listening to your body:

• Modify a workout (the intensity of it, the duration of it, or both)
• Skip a workout (yes, sometimes even if it’s a key or important workout)
• Take an extra rest day
• Adjust the sequencing of workouts within your training week
• Adjust the rhythm of your recovery weeks as part of your larger training phases within your training plan
• Decide not to pursue the goal you originally setsome text
  • This may mean not doing a race you’ve registered for

These modifications might be hard (especially emotionally), but they may very well be the best thing(s) for you, both in the short- and in the long-term.  In endurance sports training, it is so important to see the forest through the trees - to see the bigger picture.  Successful training is the result of a bunch of smaller good choices stacked on top of each other over time.  All too often, athletes get caught up in the day-to-day (especially in doing everything day-to-day) and fail to see how those choices impact the larger scope of their training, and therefore, their trajectory to their all-important goals.

The Bottom Line

Tomorrow, I challenge you to listen to your body from the time you get up until you go to sleep.  From start to finish.  What is it saying to you?  Listen to it in your “normal” life and in your workouts.  Note what you hear, and especially note what you hear if it’s not what you want to hear.  If you can learn to listen to your body, not only will you radically reduce your chance of injury, you’ll be an unstoppable force as you embark on any and all goals you set for yourself.