Need to keep rehabbing!

As you may or may not know from the series of blogs that have gone before I’ve had a bit of an interesting year since June in terms of injury, pain and not really running. The last blog was pretty positive in that I was getting back on my feet and getting more running done.

That pretty much continued over the next few weeks, with both high paced (for me) running in a few cross country races, and a few longer, but slower runs over much, much rougher terrain – like the Old Glossop Peak Raid, which was a really good run out.

All was going fabulously and I was hitting about 40-50km a week of running until a few days ago when all of a sudden from (apparently) no-where, my right hip flared up in exactly the same pain as when it all started off in June.

Argh. And there was me thinking I was being intelligent about loading and running and keeping things under control.

The best thing to do at that point is look back on my training diary over the past few weeks, see what has been going on and what has changed radically (if anything). I mentioned the pain to Lynne (wandering around the house moaning about hip pain tends not to go un-noticed) and her response was pretty much exactly what mine would have been had a patient walked through the door…

“Have you been continuing and progressing your rehab exercises?”

To which, of course, the answer was a big fat No.

Duh – idiot.

 

As tends to be the case, you do your rehab until the pain goes away and then immediately think “aha! I can get on with running now – just need to modulate the load”, and specific strengthening and specific work that makes it all work again goes out of the window. I had fallen into the classic trap that I caution people not to fall into.

Now, was it just the fact that I wasn’t continuing and progressing my rehab? Surely not?

Rehab is not linear!

Looking back through my diary, I only needed to look about 2 days prior. I had decided to start work on some hip and torso weakness, and did some pretty challenging strengthening work. Straight leg raises (which I have never been able to do), wipers and other things which strengthen the muscles that I want to work on, but also put considerable force through the area around the back of my pelvis… directly where the pain was starting. I’m not going to say that it did anything specific in terms of muscular function, but it certainly seemed to have irritated something.

Lesson learned. (Again) Continue with rehab, and if you’re going to add something new to the general regime, start in a graduated manner. No matter if it doesn’t feel like it is doing anything at the time, keep it intelligent and see if it has an effect on you the next day. There may be residual pain that you are aggravating which won’t be apparent until the next day.

It’s been a few days since the worry. The hip pain has receded and I’ve been out for a longer, gentle run with no symptoms. Bonus.

So I’m off to the gym now to continue intelligent strengthening work.

Do what your physio tells you to do, especially if that physio is yourself!

Tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.