For many Vancouver-ites, the new year brings ambitious running goals including longer races such as the marathon and half-marathon.
It’s really no wonder so many people love running: It’s low barrier to start, great cardiovascular benefits and ample opportunity for race participation in the Pacific Northwest make it an ideal fitness choice. However, it is also very repetitive and with any repetitive exercise, we humans are prone to the development of overuse of certain muscles, while others get inhibited from inefficient movement patterns or the body’s attempts to accommodate an injury, whether old or new.
Pilates provides a special opportunity to target the stability muscles that runners tend to “turn off” over time. More traditional exercises that we physiotherapists give can also be very beneficial but, from my experience of treating many runners over the years and working through injuries myself, I have found that habitual patterns are very hard to break and we will usually choose the easiest way to do an exercise and turn
Over the next 4 weeks, I will be posting one Pilates-based exercise a week here on our Alaia Blog with the goal of helping runners to gain awareness of their stability muscles and help target the areas that tend to get tight and weak with running, especially long distance training.
Here’s what you will need:
- Four feet of blue Theraband, with loops tied at both ends.
- One door anchor
(If you don’t have either of these, feel free to swing by our clinic and pick them up from us. We charge $3 for the door anchor and $10 for four feet of blue Theraband, so it will cost you a total of $13).
Want to stay in the loop? Follow us on Instagram and Facebook as we will let our followers know when the next post it up!
See you next week…
Related Posts
Exercise #1: Pilates-based Strengthening Exercises for Runners.
Exercise #2: Pilates-based Strengthening Exercises for Runners.
5 Training Errors New Runners Make and How to Avoid Them