Dr. David Koivuranta talks Toronto runners through injury prevention: wear newer shoes, warm up and cool down properly, and listen to your body. He covers desk ergonomics, sleep, cross-training, nutrition, and stress as factors that matter just as much as what you do on the road.
Chapters
Hey everyone, it's Dr. Dave. Hopefully you're all doing well and enjoying the start of a beautiful summer season. It's about 5:30 in the morning, it's really quiet out, just the sound of some birds, the occasional runner out on the trail. They're up before I even was up, they must love running more than I do. It was great this past week, we had a chance to go to the Running Room in Rosedale here in Toronto and speak this week with a group of runners that are running to improve their 5K time, and some of them that were in a learn to run program. They had us come in and talk about injury prevention, and we talked about some of the important things to runners, which includes, you know, making sure that you're in the right shoes and new shoes, not old shoes. We talked about making sure you do a proper warm-up, proper cool-down. We talked about listening to your body And we talked about these common things that probably every athlete in every discipline, regardless of their sport, should be aware of to avoid those injuries so they can keep doing what they love to do. But we also spent some time talking about some things that are more common to everyday life that if people pay attention to, it actually makes their activity a lot safer. We talked about what they bring to the table, especially if they're at a computer all day and then they go and do a run in the evening. What's the impact from that? And we talked about things like sleep, cross-training, other kinds of fitness, and of course we talked about nutrition. And then we also talked a little bit about attitude and stress and staying positive and how running kind of ties into that. And that's why probably so many people get addicted. So we had a great talk and it's very interesting because then later in the week I actually went out and did an ergonomic assessment for a company. You can really see the contrast with what people are doing all day and maybe what they want to do when they're not working. If we pay attention to what we're doing during the day, it can really support those activities otherwise. We have a couple of great handouts that we share with the people at The Running Room. If you're interested, if you click on the link below or you send something to the email you see below this video, we can send you those two PDFs. They're a good read. You might be interested in that. And of course, we offer everyone that we speak to the opportunity to come and get themselves assessed. Because the biggest way to prevent injuries is to make sure that your body is functioning well. It doesn't matter how much you eat, doesn't matter how well you cross-train, that if your body is dysfunctional and you go out and do something with it, there's an increased likelihood of injury. So we want to prevent those injuries in our practice so that people can keep enjoying what they do every day and create those great experiences. Alright? So if you'd like a copy of those reports, send us an email, click on the link below, and of course you're always welcome to come in for that assessment. We'll keep you at the game of life. Alright, you guys take care and I'll see you again soon.
