Must Do Injury Prevention Exercises for Runners
A little goes a long way when it comes to injury prevention. Taking just a little bit of extra time—I’m talking 5-10 min. per day, and probably not even every day—can keep you from taking a whole lot of time off due to a truly developed injury. Keep the weird little niggles and bigger ailments faced by runners at bay with these simple exercises.
These 5 Exercises on the Half Foam Roller.
Here’s a link to a higher density half foam roller in case you need one too!
2. These Shin Splint Prevention Exercises, in particular:
tracing the ABCs with your big toe, and
a dorsiflexion strength exercise, either the “stand against the wall, fire on the floor exercise” or using a light hand weight with a bench.
All of these are demoed in this video, which also covers truly ALL of the shin splint tips that will help you most.
3. These 4 Hip Strengthening Exercises for Your IT Band
They work! Do them!
3. Pigeon Pose!
…which (I’ve said this before and will surely say it again), just delivers tremendous “bang for your buck” in terms of time spent in the pose and benefits, especially for a runner or athlete. This pose is a good chunk of the reason why Runners Love Yoga even exists because I saw how enormously helpful it was to me in getting over my IT band woes in college. There is an entire category of hip and IT band videos to explore at Runners Love Yoga TV where I teach you this pose as well as a ton of others to do both before and after it. Find that category HERE. (Flow #94: Pigeon Pose,” an entire class centered around this essential pose is forthcoming on Fri. Jan. 21, 2022 too!) Find even more classes at Runners Love Yoga TV, and download the app for iOS HERE or android HERE too!
You don’t need to do all of these every single day—with the exception of pigeon pose, I would do that one daily if possible!! Even one round of the 5 half foam roller exercises on one day of the week, one round of the hip strengthening exercises on another day of the week, and the shin prevention stretching and strengthening as needed will really, really, really help you out. Go forth and run happy and fast and free!