Tag: injuries

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The right way to warm up: go neuromuscular

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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The best way to warm up before exercise is a pretty controversial topic. Most people still think of stretching as the best thing to do — despite the fact that plenty of research suggests it’s among the worst pre-exercise options. Researchers these days are advocating a “dynamic” or “neuromuscular” warm-up that starts with very gentle cardio exercise and progresses to increasingly specific use of the muscles and motions that your workout will involve.

I recently noticed a study by some Finnish researchers, due to appear in an upcoming issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, in which they study the effect of a neuromuscular warm-up program on “floorball” players. (Search me, I’d never heard of it either. Apparently it’s “a fast and intensive indoor team sport that is played on a court (20x40m) surrounded by a low board.”)

The neuromuscular warm-up programme consisted of four different types of exercises: 1) running technique exercises, 2) balance and body control exercises, 3) jumping exercises, and 4) strengthening exercises to the lower limbs and trunk. The neuromuscular training was carried out like a warm-up session just before floorball exercises, with low-to-moderate intensity for each exercise type. One warm-up session lasted 20-30 minutes, each exercise type taking about five to seven minutes.

So no stretching, just a series of drills that mimic the movements and use the muscles required in floorball. A companion study had already found that, after six months of this warm-up program, the 119 players using it had fewer lower-leg injuries compared to the 103 controls who were just doing their usual warm-up. This study followed that up by showing that the group doing the new warm-up was also better at jumping over a bar (power) and standing on a bar (balance).

Unless you’re a floorball player, the precise details of the warm-up routine probably aren’t that important. But it is interesting to note that this approach produced measurable good results — something that pre-exercise stretching has repeatedly failed to do. I think this is an important topic, so I’ll keep my eyes out for good warm-up studies that may be more applicable to sports I’ve actually heard of. (If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.)

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Jockology: running surfaces and injuries

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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This week’s Jockology column tackles the longstanding question of how different running surfaces affect your risk of injury. The science here is a lot less clear than you might expect.

The question

Will running on hard surfaces like asphalt and concrete increase my risk of injury?

The answer

In a study to be published later this year, Brazilian researchers found that your feet feel about 12 per cent more pressure with each foot strike when running on asphalt compared to grass.
Thanks for that newsflash, Captain Obvious, you might say.
But the findings actually contradict several earlier studies, which – despite what our intuition tells us – have found that we seem to automatically adapt our running stride so that hard and soft surfaces administer roughly the same shock to the body.
In fact, it may be the smoothness of paved surfaces that makes them dangerous to runners, rather than their hardness. And softer, less even surfaces carry their own injury risks, so the best answer may lie somewhere in the middle. [read more…]

(And a random shout-out to Dan Peterson at the Sports Are 80 Percent Mental blog — I think he was the one who introduced me to the prodigious research output of Captain Obvious, though I can’t seem to find the post I’m thinking of anymore!)

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Jockology: “active rehab” for pulls and sprains

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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The latest Jockology column appears in today’s Globe, dealing with the question of when “RICE” (rest, ice, compression, elevation) should turn into “MICE” (movement, ice, compression, elevation). It’s a tricky one, because there’s such a wide range of possible muscle pulls, sprains and tears that it’s difficult to give general advice. But the overall theme is that if you keep protecting and favouring a weak point for too long, you can end up harming the healing process.

The question

Ouch, I think I sprained something. How long should I stay off it?

The answer

Canadian figure skater Anabelle Langlois returned to action last month, earning a bronze medal with partner Cody Hay at a tournament in Germany one year after fracturing her fibula in a training accident. With Olympic dreams on the line, Ms. Langlois’s doctors had pursued every possible avenue in her rehabilitation, including two operations.

One thing they didn’t recommend, though, was a long period of complete rest for the injured leg. [read on…]

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Painkillers during a race or on a regular basis: a bad idea

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

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Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times has a really excellent article on the “prophylactic” use of “non-steroidal anti-inflammatory painkillers (NSAIDs) like ibuprofen — popping them before or during a competition, or on a regular basis before workouts, in the hopes of dulling pain or preventing subsequent soreness and swelling. It’s a must-read for everyone who does this.

In a number of studies conducted both in the field and in human performance laboratories in recent years, NSAIDs did not lessen people’s perception of pain during activity or decrease muscle soreness later… Moreover, [Indiana University researcher Stuart] Warden and other researchers have found that, in laboratory experiments on animal tissues, NSAIDs actually slowed the healing of injured muscles, tendons, ligament, and bones.

I can’t count the number of athletes I know, ranging from recreational to elite, who pop ibuprofen or equivalents on a regular “just in case” basis, hoping to avoid pain and soreness down the road. I really hope they read this article, and its conclusion:

When, then, are ibuprofen and other anti-inflammatory painkillers justified? “When you have inflammation and pain from an acute injury,” Warden says. “In that situation, NSAIDs are very effective.” But to take them “before every workout or match is a mistake.”

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Barefoot running: theory versus practice

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My new Sweat Science columns are being published at www.outsideonline.com/sweatscience. Also check out my new book, THE EXPLORER'S GENE: Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank Spots on the Map, published in March 2025.

- Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience)

***

With the publication of Chris McDougall’s Born to Run this spring, there’s been a flurry of interest in barefoot running (or minimalist running, which involves donning ultralight shoes like the Vibram FiveFingers, whose function is to keep your soles clear of broken glass and doggie doo rather than support your ankles). I had an interesting chat with McDougall for an feature I wrote in the July-August issue of Canadian Running (an excerpt is available here, but the full article isn’t available online at this point). I mention this because a reader just forwarded me a good overview of the topic from Wired, which offers its usual research-backed take on the topic [thanks for the tip, Adam].

To me, the jury is still out on this one. I like the theory behind minimalist running, and am willing to believe that, for those who take the time to build up slowly and do it right, it may be a route to injury-free running. But in practice, I’m not convinced that it’s widely applicable in our concrete-covered world, especially for people who have grown up wearing shoes. The extreme patience and diligence needed for a successful transition to barefoot running are precisely the qualities that most of us fail to demonstrate when running in regular shoes — which is why we get injured in the first place. So I think minimalism will remain a minority option for a small group of very methodical people who have tried and failed to run injury-free in regular shoes, but are truly committed to finding a way to run.