Injury Myths and Running Smarter with Brodie Sharpe

This episode of the Get Fast podcast is brought to you by Tribello Coaching, where we help cyclists and triathletes like you train smarter to race faster. You are joined as always, but your hosts, former Australian Ironman champion Jared Donnelly and I am Jordan Donnelly. And in this week's episode we have a special guest on. We have founder and creator of the Run Smarter podcast, physiotherapist and runner himself, Brody Sharp. Brody Sharp is a physio who is passionate about running, preventing running injury and getting rid of the myths and misconceptions that surround running, injury and performance. Brody started his own podcast, the Run Smarter Podcast, which we obviously love the name. And he started this podcast with a goal and a mission to help runners around the globe get evidence based approaches to preventing and managing injuries and getting rid of a lot of the myths and misconceptions around running, injury and performance. It was a great chat to Brody. We really dived into the biggest misconceptions that he sees and what to do about them. The top tips to preventing injury and managing performance. We dived into some more obscure ways to prevent injury as well, including research around personality traits and how mindset and your beliefs around injury can actually impact your physical, physical rate of injury, which was super surprising. And it was a really in depth chat with Brody which we really enjoyed. So we know you're going to enjoy this one. We cover a lot of topics around running injury and for a lot of triathletes out there, staying injury free is really important. So if you want to stay injury free and get to the start line with your body in the best shape possible, then it's going to be really important to listen to this episode. So without further ado, here is the chat with Brody Sharp from the Run Smarter podcast. So Brody, welcome to the podcast. I wanted to start off straight away by asking you about your mission and your purpose because your goal is to spread more evidence based training to runners and help runners run smarter. So tell us a little bit more about your background as a runner and as a physio and how did you end up here?

Yeah, Jarrod, Jordan, thanks for having me on guys. My background. So I am a physiotherapist by trade. I, I, it was probably about two years into my physio career that I became a runner recreational run and absolutely loved it and recognized something within myself. Like when I became the runner, as soon as I saw a runner in my clinic and I was treating them, I had this like heightened passion for wanting to get them back on track. And during the sessions I was like, talk about what races they have, what shoes they wear, what cadence they run at, and all this sort of thing. And I was just walking away from every consult, just buzzing. And yeah, recognize the need to spend more time, spending like more time around this population and trying to get them back because it brought out my better self as well and brought out a higher quality of physio that I wanted to strive towards. And yeah, so that stringed along a couple of things, one being the podcast and one being like starting Facebook groups and things like that and just spending more time around runners. Recognize that there's a lot of misconceptions out there around injury prevention or once they are injured, what to do about it. And was constantly repeating a few misconceptions and trying to debunk, decipher a lot of these misconceptions that people do have. And found that the podcast and the blogs and that sort of thing was a good medium just to bust a lot of these myths. And so it just became our mission to provide clarity and control to all those runners, especially those injured runners who are really unsure, puzzled about what to do because they get a lot of conflicting information. They get one person that says one thing and then another person says a totally different thing that totally contradicts one another. Then you just left puzzled, not sure what to do. And sometimes trying everything isn't the best solution either. So that's my mission, to try and help people to try and really provide a lot of clarity and get them on the right foot.

Awesome. That's a great start. I wanted to touch on that straightaway and go into. I mean, I know there are a lot of misconcept, which is what your whole podcast is based about, and we could talk for days on the entire list. But when you look at your experience as a physio, what are the top one or two misconceptions or myths that come to mind or the most common that you see straight away from a lot of runners?

Yeah, the first one I can talk about is it like, applies to a lot of injuries, applies to almost every injury. And that is once someone does start getting symptoms, the their natural inclination is just to completely rest that injury and just wait for the body to heal. And then after one week or two weeks, once you're starting to feel better, just jump straight back into a. Jump back on the bike or back into a run and just see how things go. And usually they'll find that symptoms are still there. Symptoms do come on, but they're usually a little bit more severe or they come on, say earlier in their run or in their training cycle and what was once coming on at 5Ks, now comes on at 3Ks and you're like, okay, maybe it hasn't healed and maybe I just need another five days, another week, another two weeks off just to let the body do its work. And then they go back into their training again a couple of weeks later, which is now overall been about three or four weeks. And symptoms come on at K1 or like, you know, 15 minutes. And that's what I find a lot of people tend to do without advice of a health professional, without a coach, because they think like naturally anyone would think, you know, the body's damaged, it just needs time to heal, then I'm okay after that. But what they're finding is those sensitive, those structures are quite sensitive. And once you injure a particular area, it actually weakens all those components just slightly. And if you combine that with complete rest, it just further weakens and deconditions all those sensitive areas. And so that's a very, very common pattern that I see for athletes in most injuries that I see. So that would be probably the number one thing that I'd bring forth to start with, to start the episode would be that like, rest isn't always best. Complete rest isn't always best for most injuries.

So with that, Brody, would you be suggesting that the level of the injury would determine the rest period that you're going to advise? Does that be. That'd be what you're saying there?

It would definitely depend on the type of injury. It definitely depend on the person itself and where we can go. Because let's just say if you have a really sensitive plantar fascia, let's just say they've gone for a run and the plantar fascia is really flared up. They, they're usually the ones that want support and want rest and want like anti inflammation or something that they want complete rest. If that is really severe, I definitely have like a complete rest. But just one or two days, let things settle down and then we need to see where we can start, where we can start loading that structure safely. And that would go back to your question. Depending on the level of severity is where that starting point might be. It might just be doing some like really like calf raises. It might just be going for a swim and just getting some blood flow around the body because that can heal quite nicely as well without even irritating the structure whatsoever. It might be things like doing some heavy calf raises. Or just loading up the fascia if it can sustain a little bit more load, if it's not as irritable. So, yes, you can have complete rest for like a day or two, maybe three, four days max. But then we need to start somewhere. And depending where that starting level is would depend on the level of severity.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And one of the other members of the Donnelly family, my brother, is also a physio and he actually sent us an article a few weeks ago saying something similar. He said the subject of the article was a written paper and it said rice is out. So those who don't know Rice, it's rest, ice, compress, elevate. It's what you kind of taught generally as soon as you have an injury. It was quite an aggressive headline. So you would agree with that headline, would you? If Rice is gone, it's just not. It should not be commonplace anymore.

There's a different acronym for injuries now which I absolutely love, and it is called peace and Love, which is a very long word, very long acronym.

And.

And the PEACE side of that is the one to two days that I was talking about. Protection, elevation, avoid anti inflammations, compression, and educate. Just educate on the right steps to do so. They're like immediate kind of things, and that's only if there is an acute injury with inflammation and that sort of stuff, which can automatically disclude a lot of injuries that we do say. But the love aspect of it is load optimizing or optimism, vascularization and exercise. And that's just promoting all of that. What we were just talking about, staying active, getting the blood flowing, making sure that we're loading the structures appropriately, making sure you're staying optimistic around your goals. And that takes in the mental component side of things as well, instead of everything being quite detrimental and really catastrophizing a lot of your attitudes and a lot of your beliefs and yeah, covers a lot. So I really love that new acronym.

I do want to touch on that mental side of things a little bit and we will get more into it later as well. But when the reason that a lot of athletes would rest or feel like resting, I know this is my experience as well, is when you do an injury, you're really hesitant to do more damage and you really don't want to do more damage and go to the physio and say, oh, yeah, I kept running and I did more damage and I feel like an idiot now. But this conflicting advice is kind of actually, you need to get moving faster. You might Be a little bit apprehensive. So how do you combat that mental apprehension around getting the body moving too soon?

Definitely education is a big one and it might just be taking small steps. If there is a lot of fear there, it doesn't have to be getting straight back into running. It can be doing some like low level exercises, like where we start, like any starting point can just be based on the advice of a coach or the advice of a health professional. But that, like you said, it's human nature, like if someone is injured, it's human nature to rest it and it's human nature to have that kind of fear ingrained because that's what the brain does. The brain wants to protect you, it wants to keep you away from danger. And that's why it's so prevalent that I see in my clinics and what I see with runners, because that's just behavior in a nutshell. But if you provide the right education, just with what we're talking about now, if you. Sometimes loading in an optimal level can actually accelerate this healing, actually get you back so much quicker. And, and if you are really apprehensive about jumping back on the bike or back in the run, let's start slowly. Let's go for a walk for 45 minutes, or let's do like a really slow jog on for one minute and then walk for five minutes and let's just slowly integrate something. And if that's still sparking some fear, let's start doing some lunges, let's start doing bodyweight lunges, let's start doing some squats or jump squats or something just to not only start building up the tolerance of those tissues, but mentally it starts providing a lot more confidence. Oh, I can do that. You know what? I just did three sets of lunges and I'm feeling really good. I'm actually feeling better. I actually feel okay the next day without symptoms flaring up. So that can help that starting process and help confirm that belief that you're delivering the right education. And if there is a flare up, let's just say we've started doing lunges and there is a spark in symptoms. Make sure you jump on that education to be like, okay, we're trying to work out your starting point. We're trying to work out what you can tolerate right now. We've tried something that you can't tolerate that. Let's have a rest for a day and let's start with something a little bit more of a low level level of functioning and work our way Back up.

That's a really great summary. One of the things that is, from a coaching point of view, is kind of frustrating a lot of the time is there is always a reason why the injury occurred in the first place. And you talked about education. I think a lot of the mistakes, and I've been a classic example of this, making the same mistake repeatedly and expecting a different result. I've had chronic calf injuries pretty much my whole life, but understanding what the problem was with the calf, rather than just resting and resuming back to where you were and progressing like you just described, from a slower base or a slightly different angle. But if the. If the injury, the reason you got injured in the first place because there is something actually structurally wrong with the method of training that you're doing, how important do you think that is in the education side of the injury? And where do you place that emphasis on understanding? Hang on a minute. I have. I'm just picking calf injuries as an example, or hamstring, you know, to rest and rehabilitate. Starting from a lower point. The possibility that it will reoccur is high unless you do something different than when you did before you did the injury.

Yeah. If you're noticing that the same injury is happening time and time again and you're not sure why it's happening, or you're not too sure of the training method and that sort of thing, you really need to ask yourself a few questions. And when it comes to addressing these sort of misconceptions, we need to think, okay, does my belief of why I have this calf injury, is it actually true, or is it just something that I believe, something I've been told, or. Because a lot of people think it might be, say, a flexibility issue, and we can touch on that for a whole episode. But if someone believes that they're getting calf issues because of their flat feet, because they're too stiff, because it's the wrong shoes, they need new shoes, all this sort of thing, they're going to be false beliefs and they're going to not serve you with your rehab moving forward. And if you constantly think that's the issue and you're not addressing the underlying cause, which is, it might be strength, it might be your training load, it might be you're pushing yourself too much, it might be your. Your level of intensities throughout the week, it might just be too much. If that's being ignored because you think the reason of your calf issues is something else, then you're going to continue having these certain. You're going to have these repeat issues popping up. And so it's worth the discussion, it's worth that education side of things. Of, okay, what do you think? What do you think causes a lot of your injuries? And there was a really nice article, I think it was around 2014, and they interviewed a whole bunch of recreational runners and it was 95 recreational runners and just discussed, what do you think? Why do you think runners get injured? And it was just a really nice descriptive article just working out people's beliefs and people's attitudes towards why they get injured. And a lot of it was around the foot shape, a lot of it was around flexibility, a lot of it was around just a lot of these misconceptions that science just doesn't show is the case. And yeah, so that would be my answer is we want to address the right beliefs. We want to make sure we're all on the same wavelength to work why you're getting injured. And then we need to move forward with the right things rather than just continuing to go on with the belief that you think it's your shoes and not addressing the underlying issue.

That's a really key point to make, especially with your own personal perception can be so off. And if you're not educated properly, then you're going to be coming to false conclusions. I read a random stat I don't know a couple of years ago. I think it was in some random article that said pretty much if you ask a massive survey of recreational runners, some whopping 80 plus percent are running with some sort of real serious soreness or injury. And whether that's exactly accurate or not, I don't mind. The point is the same. Most runners would agree that they run with some sort of discomfort pretty consistently. So that leads to the next question I wanted to ask is how does someone know and learn when an injury is an injury or when it's just soreness? And you've spoken about this in your own podcast, I really wanted you to touch on it here. You know, good soreness versus bad soreness, injury versus just soreness.

Yeah, let's just say someone's a healthy individual and like once they, if they're in their 60s and 70s, I'd expect some like just generic soreness, like the joints to be a little bit stiff to move around and like just emphasize your recovery, emphasize your warm up and that. But for the majority, 95% of the recreational runners out there, we're trying to establish when it comes to soreness. Okay, what is good soreness, which I would say is doms delayed onset muscle soreness and what is an injury developing? And it's very hard for someone to differentiate between the two. But there are some key characteristics that put them into those two different categories. And so you have the good pain, which is delayed onset muscle soreness. This is the pain that the body goes through in order to repair the body in order to get stronger, in order to increase the level of tolerance for your future training. This is usually like the onset is like we call delayed onset. So it usually comes on either the next day or the day after. So between that 24 hours after doing an intense exercise, there should be a pattern of why that has occurred. Usually if someone goes to a gym and they do a new exercise and they're feeling sore in the chest or the arms the next day, it's like, yeah, because I just did chest press. I haven't done that for a long time. That makes sense. If you have really sore hamstrings because you've done a sprint session, or you've got really sore glutes because you've just done a hill session and you don't usually do hills and you feel that the next day, that makes sense in your training. The other characteristics, apart from it occurring with like 24 hours after the exercise, is it's usually within the muscle. It's usually quite vague. It's usually around the muscle belly, it's usually sore to activate that muscle or stretch that muscle, it'll kind of feel a little bit tender. And also it resolves, it usually resolves within two to four days, depending on how intense it is, depending on how new it is. That would be your characteristics within the good soreness, that DOM soreness. On the opposite side of things, sometimes pain might come on during the session, sometimes pain might come on or symptoms come on like as you cool down. That is way too early for it to be doms. Therefore there's a few alarm bells that might be occurring apart from it. Like with the doms being in the muscle belly. Sometimes the bad kind of pain can be like a local, a localized symptom towards like the joints or towards a tendon or towards bone or towards ligament. And it's, you can point with it with one finger or it's like in a general space. It's not just like the generic muscle belly. And the other thing is like, it just doesn't resolve in two to four days. Most injuries, if going ignored, would go for more than a week, we'll go for two weeks, go for three weeks, that's definitely signs for alarm and sometimes some early symptoms can come on and then just resolve just with a day or two rest. That's okay, just as long as you pay attention to that. You put that as a little marker and make sure it's not popping up every now and then every couple of weeks, because that's when it could potentially develop into something more serious moving forward. So they're the, they're the kind of characteristics that will sort of separate them between good pain and bad pain that.

Did you ask?

Yep, I was just gonna. There's so many points you've covered there which are fantastic for our listeners to. And I know the majority of triathletes that we coach and runners. Getting to the start line is almost, you know, a feat in itself without actually injuring yourself. And you can derail your whole program with, with not paying attention and not understanding the particular nuances of your. Of your injury. And the difference between the doms and the real injury is such a hard one for people to understand. I just want to ask on the doms, which is, you know, you're obviously the example you gave is going into the gym and doing something you haven't done before, which will cause and create some muscle soreness. But that is a good thing because. Because you've broken down some of the cells and they're rejuvenating, double the size. And that's really what we want to do in our training. We want to progress and improve, whether it's the muscle fibers or our cardio. Do you recommend that style of training? Would you be advising people to really go and do that sort of stuff? For example, if you haven't done sit ups for a while and all of a sudden you're in a PE class at school and the teacher makes you do maximum sit ups, maximum. Is that something that you would steer away from even though you do get a benefit down the track from the actual activity? Where do you sit looking at that style of. From a physio point of view?

I guess it would depend on the athlete. It depends on their goals that they have in mind. It depend on just getting a scope of their general looking month over month, how often they saw, how often they dealing with like doms. Because in most cases if you say if you haven't done weighted lunges for a while, you're going to wake up and the muscles around the hips are going to be very, very sore. But if you do that for two or three weeks, that same load is going to be nothing like you usually have. Might have some light soreness for a day and then you're good to go. If you notice as a coach or as a health professional that an athlete is preparing for a race and the majority of the time is just negotiating doms and they're like constantly sore, I would question their level of intensity. I'd question if they're the gym sessions are too intense or they're the actual workout sessions on the bike, on the, when they're running, you know, when they're swimming, if that's too intense. Because that really shouldn't happen there. There really should be a lot of like the, the bulk of your training, especially when you're building up bases, that sort of stuff, it should be around that lower intensity so you can go again the next day and the body can recover. You can work out the next day, do something else the next day, rather than just feeling like you're waking up and you're kind of like hobbling and you're kind of feeling like really sore, really tired. So I'd question that. But if you're doing something new, you should expect that, that muscle soreness, like if we use that example of like doing, just going ahead and doing a whole bunch of sit ups and then having like, you know, three, four days of soreness. Is sit ups what we want to do if we want to prepare for a triathlon is, is this what we want to do? Probably not. If we wanted to do say really heavy calf raises or plyo jumps and all this sort of stuff, does that match our training? It's specific to the training that we want, yes. Okay. Is it going to create soreness the first time we do it? Yes. Is it going to settle down with the muscle soreness if we continue, if we persist with it for two or three weeks? Yes. So we want to make sure that that is done earlier in our training, like months, months before the actual event itself. And then we're building up a really nice base. After a couple of weeks we're feeling quite good and then we can start when it gets closer to the race, topping up that top end and sort of getting into some higher intensities or more specific to race conditions, all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, to answer your question for a physio, from my perspective, you shouldn't be spending a lot of time being sore in the general week, the general mileage. I hope that. Does that answer your question or did I tail off a bit?

No, absolutely. And I suppose the two key things is the intensity of your training and if your body has not had the base to cope with it, then that's a recipe for disaster. And also the recovery. So the intensity in the recovery period, you're giving yourself the recovery period could really enable the soreness to disappear, as you know. And examples would be doing a recovery ride on the bike rather than going for a recovery run, which would just, you know, enhance blood flow, which is, you know, what we're trying to do is repair the damaged muscles, whereas running for recovery run can continue to keep the soreness there, I imagine. And that's sort of, you know, those two things, the intensity and the recovery that do you see them as the keys to enabling you to perform well in training? So you get to race day, you know, in the best possible shape.

Yeah, and I'll touch on that as well. Like when there's a fine line between doms and developing an injury and that's where you need a coach, that's where you need a health professional. Because you're not just if you just smash out lunges when you've never done lunges before, but you're also doing plyo lunges or you're doing weighted plyo lunges. That's just a huge spike in training that's going to lead to an injury anyway, which we don't recommend. But you can not do squats for a very long time and then only do bodyweight squats and still be sore the next day. So we're kind of in that safe zone where you're going to experience doms but not really experience an injury. So we don't want to advocate doing a massive intensity of something that you haven't done for a long time. When it comes to recovery, recovery is everything. That's where we get stronger, that's where we start recovering. That's where we become better athletes, is when you start emphasizing on your recovery. And if you want to work harder and you want to work on getting a faster split or getting faster races and really improving and getting those high intensity sessions, you need to emphasize more recovery over than just like your recreational runner. Like I don't focus a lot on the recovery. If I'm not doing high mileage things, I do focus on recovery. It's not a high priority of mine. If I was to prepare for a marathon and really be doing high mileage stuff and some high intensity sessions, that's when my recovery needs to be top notch, need to make sure that I'm sleeping well, that I'm eating well and all this sort of stuff, which would be the majority of the people you work with anyway. So yes, recovery is massive. Yes, we can do our active recoveries. Going on a bike just for a light session is a lot or even just a swim and is better because you sort of resting a couple of energy systems there rather than going for a slow jog. You'd be surprised to know how much force is required for your feet, calf, knee, how much force goes through that even just when you're walking, even when you're just doing a light jog. You're looking at two to three times your body weight every step. It's just not enough to enhance recovery. So yeah, I would totally agree with what you're saying.

A topic you've touched on there is the strength and conditioning component. We are big advocates to, to also bust that myth that athletes should never do strength and conditioning. And I know that you really want athletes to do it as a part of their whole training process. But you know dad, you touched on before kind of the topic that what's specific for the athlete and especially for triathletes, most of their training is going to be based around endurance. And so on race day there's not much intensity for ironman or half ironman. You know, it's, it's sub threshold kind of efforts. And dad, you harp on this a lot that it's not a fast day. And so they don't actually need to be doing sprinting sessions. There's no need for age group of triathletes to be doing track sessions sprinting for their endurance events. They can do faster sessions but no need for that sprint. But that could also make athletes feel that there's no need for weight training. But I want to hear your thoughts on why weight training or strength and conditioning training is good and even if they get some doms in that sense, why that's still going to be good and beneficial for.

Yeah, and I'm like my main area is working with runners and most of runners they think they don't have the time to do strength and conditioning. I don't know what it's like for triathletes but they're constantly like they've got so much things they have to work on and so much things to stay on top of that. I just, yeah, that's where you need like a really well designed, well timed plan with a coach just to say okay, this is when we're doing our run and our ride and our swim and our strength sessions. Because it's hard enough for me to convince runners to do their strength and Conditioning work. But yeah, it's going to be just a tougher to try and convince it to triathletes. But we do know this from science. I'll speak from the running point of view because that's all the literature that I read. But doing heavy sort of strength sessions, we really want to start encouraging runners to go away from the body weight style exercises and doing bodyweight, lunges, squats, calf raises, to really building on the heavier side of things. It doesn't mean that we need to work on like it will tip off your, your sprint sessions. You won't do that. Like the strength, the heavy stuff does complement endurance based sports. It does make your running economy better. It does this really naturally working little like mini surges within a race. It definitely helps with that. But when it comes to endurance, we all care about the running economy and that's like how, how efficient you're working and how efficient you're utilizing your oxygen stores and how efficient the muscle is at utilizing those oxygen stores so that you can run slightly faster. But it feel like the same effort. That's like helping with your running economy and strength. Strength and conditioning has been proven to help with that. And when you're getting to the heavier side of exercises, so adding weights onto your lunges, calf raises, squats, that's where the real benefits have shown. And there's mountains of evidence to show that the heavier side of strength training does help the endurance athlete.

That's great to hear. Dad, did you have a question on that?

Yeah. And look at, you know, I'm a real keen learner and listener to the experts. And there's been lots of controversy on too much strength and conditioning for endurance athletes could be detrimental. And more body weight, type of strength and conditioning could be more accurate for an endurance athlete. Why would they need to be doing so much heavy lifting? And they're the questions that I'm getting asked a lot. Should I be doing a lot more really heavy weights? And I'm talking about an ironman where the event could possibly be between 9 and 14 hours. Where is the benefit in doing some heavy strength leg presses or when you're already doing lots of quad hamstring work on the bike and a good coach will have you doing low cadence strength work on the bike, which is exactly specific to how it's going to be in a race. Yeah, I just like your opinion on where you see that, you know, for endurance. You just touched on it there. But you know, are you really. Yeah. What are you saying in terms of, you know, I'm talking Ironman 70.3, which is, you know, five to 15 hour events.

Yep. So like I said, I don't know too much around the cycling component of things. I think the benefits that you will receive with a runner can translate onto the bike, I'm assuming. But there's a lot of misconceptions when it comes to being heavier in the gym and becoming like a gym go up. People really don't want to do that. They want to stick to low body weight, like really working their aerobic system as much as they can. And that's where they're going to spend the majority of their training. That's what the majority that they're going to do the recommended level for. I think with endurance athletes, the recommended frequency for strength training should be twice a week to build up your strength. Once you're at a level of strength that you're kind of happy with, you only need to do it once a week to maintain the strength that you've gained. So you're not going to be spending a lot of time in the gym. And a lot of people are fearful, especially if they're, let's say they're doing an Ironman and they know it's a long distance. They want to keep their body weight down. A lot of the fear is they're going to become this big bulky or even just put on a couple of kilos when they, they're hitting the gym and they're gonna lose their flexibility because they see these kind of big gym people walking around with really reduced mobility and that kind of stuff. And it's understandable. It's a fear that a lot of people have because that's the image that they portray when, when there's a gym goer, there is a thing called the interference effects. And Richard Blagrove talks about this in his book. It's called Strength and Conditioning for Endurance Runners and lists all the benefits when it comes to strength work for endurance runners. And I had him, I interviewed him on my podcast, which was a really interesting discussion. And he talks about this. People think they will put on body weight and he talks about this interference effect. And if within your week, if you're doing some strength sessions where you're lifting really heavy, but you're also combining that with a lot of aerobic training and a lot of run cycles on the other days and mixing that within your week, your body will prioritize the aerobic component rather than the, the building the muscle mass and all that kind of thing. It will prioritize the, the energy efficiency and the aerobic system. So to put it simplistically, you won't put on weight. If you're combining strength sessions with running, you won't do it. Um, you might put on like half a kilo here and they will get more defined. You might put on a little bit of muscle mass, but it's nowhere near as much as you think. Um, you might get a little bit of definition, but the body will prioritize. A low lean body if you're combining it with the aerobic systems. And that's comforting for a lot of people to know and to go back to the, let's say, the ironman style of things. If someone's doing a whole bunch of hours and hours of aerobic and they don't want to get into the anaerobic side, just let them know that it's going to enhance their running economy. And it's just another tool in your tool belt because you're also, not only are you enhancing the running economy side of things, you're also increasing your capacity for certain ligaments, certain tendons, certain muscles to tolerate a certain level of exercise. When it comes to building up the capacity of your tendons, ligaments, joints, everything like that, you've got like these kind of three buckets that you want to top up in order to be like a well rounded athlete. And that comes with endurance, it comes with building up the strength and it comes with building up the, the power, the explosiveness. And when it comes to like a triathlete, you kind of want to fill all these buckets. And if you're spending the majority of your time doing endurance runs like strength session, well, I guess some strength sessions you can do on the bike, but you're really not doing heavy stuff. You're not doing like the plyometric stuff. But if you're spending the majority of your time doing the low intensity, longer endurance sort of stuff, you're definitely ticking the endurance bucket. And we're really happy with that. But we're not necessarily addressing, we're addressing kind of half of the strength bucket, but not really a lot of the plyometric power bucket. And what happens is if we spend like one to two weeks doing the strength training side of things, you're definitely starting to fill up those strength buckets and those plyometric buckets. And that's just allowing the tendons, the ligaments, the joints to start increasing the capacity through all of those modes of exercises. And that makes you a more resilient athlete, makes you more resilient to injuries in the future. And so you're kind of just ticking all those buckets. So apart from having the like the running economy side of things, you've also got that resilience side of things. So I guess that would be my answer.

That's a good summary. I was about to ask, so in summary of all that, what is the biggest benefit? Is it the injury prevention or is it the running economy side? But I guess it's a mix of both. And having that capacity from your body. Correct?

Yeah, I say the, I say the buckets in the injury prevention. In theory. Like it just makes a whole lot of sense based on the research that I've said. There isn't one. Like we can't make the assumption that strength training reduces our risk of injury because the injury itself is so multifactorial and we get injured for multitude of reasons and the way we have to conduct our studies, there isn't literature to support the fact that strength and conditioning will reduce your risk of injuries. There's a mountain of evidence to show that it will increase your performance, it'll increase your endurance performance, it'll increase your marathon times. There's so much along those lines. But yeah, it's hard for us to make the conclusion that it will reduce your risk of injury based on literature that's out there. But it makes a whole lot of sense to me that you're ticking those buckets and you're addressing all of those, I guess, weak links you could call them. Yeah, that's, that's what my conclusion would be and just make sense.

Definitely. So talking about the literature and the science, something that is very hard to measure in a evidence report is the mindset side of things. And it's, it's hard to get a study on that. But it is such a big part and everyone knows it's a big part. It's just, it's hard to measure. And I'm really fascinated that that O is optimism in the Peace and Love acronym because there is evidence that a positive mindset actually can be one of the biggest contributing factors to injury rehab. So I wanted to ask your thoughts on this and especially because I know that you recently attended the Tony Robbins seminar. Those who don't know Tony Robbins, he's one of the most powerful mindset, I guess, leaders in the world. And his courses are a big phenomenon worldwide. Although you'd argue that they're not, they're not as evidence based, they're probably more anecdotal based, yet produced some incredible Results. And I've also heard you on your podcast use the Roger Bannister analogy to talk about this, which is just such a brilliant example. He's the first person to ever break the four minute mile, which a lot of people around the world said wasn't humanly possible. Our human body was not capable of actually doing it. And now hundreds of athletes around the world have done it ever since then in the last 40 years. So a lot of this points to the fact that our mindset has a lot to do with these things, more than we can probably measure. So what's your thoughts on this? On the optimism side of things, the mindset side of things. And based on everything that you read, you study the Tony Robbins factor. What do you think about all this?

Yeah, yeah. Where do I start? I think when you're saying that it's hard to study this particular topic. There are some studies out there that have a look at like risk of injury based on personality types that has been shown and there are some really, really interesting findings. Mainly the certain personalities that do get injured or harder to recover from injury. And, and that's when we look at the type A's. We look at the triathletes that are go getters. They really are energetic, they're self motivated, they strive for a lot, they want to get results, those sort of things, which is fine. That's why we exercise. And that's what motivates a lot of people, that's what gets a lot of people really good results. But there can be some negative sides to that personality type as well. Perfectionism is a component that can be really good for people and not so good for another. There was a, there was a study that put together, they did a few mental health outcomes for people and had a look at, and then just followed them along so they're not injured. They fill out this health questionnaire around mindset around personality and all that sort of stuff and then they follow them along to see if they do develop an injury. And they broke off perfectionism into perfectionism strivings. So those who strive for high standards and that sort of thing, but then also had perfectionism concerns. So those who have a fear of not being good enough and striving towards something like being quite concerned about their level of performance but still striving for that performance. So the negative side of things, of perfectionism you could say, and those who rated really high and the perfectionism concerns were 17 times more likely to develop an injury rather than being higher in all those other factors. So there is a definite link between them. And I do see the personality types that do develop an injury and they return way too soon, way too eager because they get jitteriness, they get like they need to get back into their running because it's their mental health side of things that's like, it's their identity, they really want to get back into it and they, they come back too soon, too fast, too far and because that's all they know. And then the injury gets more severe, develops and yeah, it's a mess. And so you have to really settle them down, giving them another option to still stay active while this injury is being managed because they can't sit still and they're particularly tricky, especially if they're only runners because it's the only thing they know. And they won't go on the bike and they won't go for a swim and they won't do some strength based exercises. You're limiting a lot of your options in that way. So there is a link between personality, mindset, that kind of thing. But what I found doing this Tony Robbins event, so I did it with my brother and we were meant to go to Sydney to do it for four days he's done this was Unleash the Power Within. So it's a four day seminar. He's also done it a couple of years ago with some of my other family members. I didn't go that year but wanted to go this year. They turned into a virtual event due to the pandemic and we'll be going to Sydney to attend next year if it's going, if we're still allowed to do that. But yeah, so it was really well organized. We were just in our living rooms 12 hours a day for four days straight, sometimes 13, 14 hours. It was really intense, but really breaking down your limiting beliefs and help you strive to become a better person with your health, wealth, relationships, career, all this sort of stuff and really breaking down. And I really, it made me apply this to a lot of the runners and who I'm teaching and who I'm coaching and who I'm trying to help overcome certain injuries, chronic injuries. And really gets down to when I see someone with a chronic injury, there's certain characteristics that, that I'm finding, especially those who've had injuries for three years, four years, five years and still dealing with the same injury. And they usually have the common characteristic of like anxiety, depression, like fears, developed a lot of misconceptions along the, along the way. They tell themselves certain things of their living in the past of why they got injured, what they got told early in their injury, who they're blaming, they're blaming their physical therapist, physio, GP surgeon for telling them the wrong things in the early days. And they're living in that space and it's really hard to progress forward and have a real optimistic outlook when you keep referring back to all those traumatic kind of experiences and kind of living in that moment. I did have a lady who had three years of a tib post tendinopathy and in her early days, like a year of having that injury, she saw a surgeon and the surgeon told her that you can try all the rehab you want, but it's not going to get any better because tendons don't heal. And you're going to. You can try everything you want, but you're going to come back to me and you're going to need surgery because tendons don't heal. We need to. The only way they can get better is with surgery, which is just makes my blood boil. It's just like the worst advice you could ever give to anyone because it's not true and it's left them powerless and it's left them to. How are they meant to go about trying the right things when they believe that it's not going to do anything? So that's when we have to practice a couple of things. We have to practice getting the right beliefs, we have to practice changing their mindset around gratitude, Making sure that we're focusing on like the future rather than the past. Making sure we're focusing on the stuff that you do have rather than what you don't. Because a lot of them, like, I just want to run pain free. I just want to run pain free. How about being blessed that you can walk pain free? How about being blessed that you can get up out of bed and like, you know, start appreciating what you do have rather than what you don't have. And just that mental mind switch can really start to create optimism, start, create happiness and start. Create a better outlook. And that just having that and implementing that can help the body regenerate and help the body heal itself. And it actually switches into like the physical components actually physically helps you heal rather. And all you've done is just switch your mindset.

It's pretty amazing. It's pretty wild world, isn't it?

Absolutely.

Control the controllables is something that we really push a lot and, you know, things that are out of your control, it's wasted energy.

Yeah. How many people are like really disappointed because the weather wasn't good on race day. And it's like we can't control the weather. So let's focus on what we can control.

Oh, well, I was just going to say, I mean, it's. What you're saying is so spot on. And we just, a lot of the time we just don't think about it. You know, firstly, we're trying to get education, like we said at the start of this podcast, on the physical side of injuries. But this mental side plays just as big a part. Yet we don't really know how to measure it either, or we're not well educated on it. But all those factors you said can contribute such a difference and it's well worth thinking about. A couple of last questions. To finish off, I wanted to kind of get a bit of broad advice from you. When you think about runners or even triathletes that are running as well, what are some of the best ways or tips you could give them to prevent injuries long term?

Okay, first of all, when it comes to preventing injuries, it's recognizing what causes injuries rather than those of those misconceptions that we talked about. I did write down a few. So like, recognizing it is. If anyone's listened to all of your episodes, they should, this should be, shouldn't be new news. But doing too much too soon, just having really spent spikes in training load, just recognizing that and having a real well designed program would significantly reduce your risk of injury because we know that the majority of injuries are due to training errors and they're due to spikes in load. The other thing that people don't really recognize is other acute changes. It's not necessarily how far, how fast, but it can be acute changes like, say, terrain, like doing hills, running up hills, downhills. It could be acute changes in your footwear. So going from like a really supportive shoe to something that's really light and flimsy and they're still doing the same mileage, the same speed, but if they have that rapid change, that's going to increase your risk of injury. I had some guy who had hamstring issues for a really long time and he did. He's like, I still do high mileage on the bike. And he loves riding, but he had his bike, he had the seat height changed or he had like the bike frame changed and then just went and did 100k ride. Because he's used to doing 100ks, but he's gone straight from a change in posture, change in position to riding 100Ks. And your body just didn't develop it. And so he developed a lot of hamstring issues after that. So those acute changes still on the topic of injury prevention, personality looking at like recognizing any training areas that you're cause that's due to your drive and your motivation and your heightened levels, like all that stuff we discussed before. If you're striving perfection, if you have these really heightened or unrealistic expectations that you've set upon yourself, just self reflect and kind of just be kindly to yourself, kind of do that. I notice it's probably the same with triathletes, runners, they develop, they get this, they set themselves like a really high standard, a really high bar, really high like goal or race that they want to get to. And then when they finally achieve it, they don't really celebrate, they just move on to the next thing. They don't really celebrate the small wins and celebrate what they're putting themselves through and all the hard work they put in, they just move straight. They might celebrate for half a day and then they're moving on to the next one, they got another ticket to go to the marathon, all that sort of stuff. So be nice to yourself. That's being optimistic is really good for injury prevention and then just recovery. Making sure you're prioritizing the sleep, the nutrition, making sure you're paying attention to stress levels. And if you do notice certain lifestyle changes, like if you've moved house, if you've had a baby, if you've got a really stressful job promotion, if you are experiencing really like small windows of increased stress, decreased levels of sleep, don't do your high intensity sessions then don't do your high mileage weeks. On those weeks, wait till your body starts recovering, wait till you're sleeping better, wait till the stress levels come back down, then start doing your high mileage exercise and you start your high intensity stuff where your body can start tolerating it. So there are some of the things that we really need to recognize, we really need to self reflect on. And I like to say they will significantly reduce your risk of injury. But we can't get that injury risk down to zero. It's a goal that everyone wants. Injury prevention is the goal. But we can't get all the way down to zero. We can make really, really smart steps in your training to get close to that zero, but we can't, we can't get to zero. Injuries are going to happen. It's a way of life. If the real, the real advice I like to give People is once injuries start developing, like we said, it's sometimes it's unavoidable, but when those symptoms start ar, it's knowing how to interpret those symptoms and it's knowing what to do from day one. And the really right thing is day one, day two, day three, really set you up well. That would turn a one week injury like it will become a one week injury instead of a three month injury. And that's the real, that's the real goal that's going to keep you moving forward and you just overcome that injury, just move on, continue with the training, then something else might happen, might only be for two or three days, then you move on, then you move on, then you move on. That's when you're going to see the real results in your, in your races, in your race times, because you're continuously exercising instead of being held back four weeks, six weeks with an injury and then trying to get back into it again. And it's just building that momentum, which can be really, really powerful.

It's a vicious circle, isn't it? You, you get less injuries by maintaining consistency, but you also risk the, the injury by doing too much. So patience is a massive factor in any good program and people who start with, as you said, the goal and expectation of achieving it in a minute compared to giving themselves time is a really massive thing. People need to learn. It's a bad, less hard lesson to learn. Patience is something that's going to hold you in good stead and you've really summarized those. It's a massive amount of lots of things, isn't it? Not just one thing.

Patience is a great word. And when we're talking about personalities like if you've found someone that's highly competitive, highly self motivated, highly driven, holds themselves real high expectations, you reckon they're going to have patience? Probably not.

That's a great way to finish. Did you have any more questions you want to ask? Dad? Finish off.

You pretty much summarize exactly what I was going to ask at the end there was, you know, what are the factors that you would be giving advice to for any, you know, budding new runner or marathon runner or triathlete who's really aspiring to develop their running without having, you know, the risk of injury, you know, derailing their program? Which is, which is what I said earlier. You know, half the battle is getting to the start line as healthy as you can. So would you summarize saying sometimes less is more and you know, it is more, more important to do little and you Talked about it, the mindset, just doing little things and celebrating. You know, I've had two weeks of consistent training rather than three fantastic sessions, but five days off because I was sore.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah.

What advice is that? What you sort of would promote to everyday.

We can end with it with a couple of like really key messages. And that being just that, like, we want to maintain consistency. We want to make sure that we're avoiding a high intensity session that needs three days of recovery. We definitely want to make sure that your frequency is up and you're maintaining a really nice, consistent training load. But also which goes around to my philosophy of the podcast and my career is making sure you have the right advice. Making sure you're. You train with increasing your level of intelligence around training smarter. If you have that, like, if you address, you know, what the misconceptions are, you know, what's reality, you know why you've developed this injury, you know why certain things are limiting you from achieving that. And then you're working on that and all science based and it's all like really rational sort of stuff. If you have that and you have, if you know how to train smart, you have a huge advantage against all your competitors, against all the other athletes there. But compared to someone who has all these misguided, confused, like this puzzling sort of stuff of how do I increase my performance, how do I reduce my risk of injury. Yeah, consistency is a huge, huge thing. But it's also just having that intelligence you have that once you grasp a lot of these concepts, you have that for life. You have that for every race, for every training preparation moving forward. Because this stuff doesn't change. And if the science tends to slowly move towards something rather than another thing, because we used to know, we used to think stretching helped with decreasing our risk of injury and all that kind of stuff, but once the evidence starts shifting towards something else, just being on top of it, listening to podcasts like you guys and listening to literature and listening to the rights sort of thing and following the right people gives you a huge advantage in race preparations, reducing your risk of injury and having a really successful career.

That's a great summary. That's a really great way to finish. Thank you very much for joining us, Brody. We really pumped to have you on the podcast. You've been really informative. I'm sure we'll have you on again to discuss some more myths and misconceptions or specific injuries in depth. We'd really love to go through some. I know you've got a lot of things that, again, make your blood boil that you'd like to make clear with runners out there. Just tell our listeners about a bit about your podcast and where they can best find you.

Yeah, so I always encourage people to go to the podcast first, so it's the Run Smarter podcast. You can just search and find wherever you listen to your podcast. Now, I am active on Instagram, so the Run Smarter series is my handle. They're usually where I produce the most content. So I recommend you go there and if you just want to either join the Facebook group and reach out and if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to do that. But yeah, I recommend going to the podcast, starting back at episode one and listening to the first 10 episodes. They're the 10 principles to overcome any injury, which I've deliberately put as the very first 10 episodes that every runner needs to know. So have a listen to those and then start scrolling through any relevant episodes that might appeal to you is a really good first step. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Awesome. Thanks very much, Brody. Really appreciate this and thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time.