Impact of Non-Running Activity on Running Injuries

As most runners know, running-related injuries (RRI) can sneak up on you when you least expect them. Typically, when injury strikes a runner quickly thinks through their recent runs and training regimens to find the culprit. While this is important, a new clinical commentary in JOSPT highlights the importance of considering all physical activity in your life and how those may contribute to injury. This includes everything from walking to the coffee shop to doing yard work to even using a standing desk.

How do Running-Related Injuries Occur?

Typically, overuse injuries occur when the loading stimulus exceeds the loading capacity. Essentially, when you run too long or too hard on muscles that aren’t strong enough to handle it. However, it’s not just running-related factors like gait, running surface change, sudden change in running volume, or frequency of running that contribute to this overuse. All physical activity can make a runner vulnerable to RRI.

Frequent repetition of tasks or greater magnitudes of stress can all result in tissue damage, whether that’s from running or chasing after young children. To avoid injury, runners need to be careful with all physical activity.

How Daily Physical Activity Contributes to Injury

The JOSPT commentary looks at physical activity as any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in energy expenditure, and covers four domains: occupational, transportation, household or domestic, and leisure time.

Leisure-time encompasses running and other exercise done voluntarily while in leisure time.

Why is it important to acknowledge all forms of physical activity when evaluating a running-related injury? Even seemingly benign tasks such as standing or light activities outside formal exercise can incur greater than expected levels of tissue loading.

For example, 30 minutes of standing accumulated the same total knee joint load as 30 minutes of walking and 56% of the knee joint load caused by 30 minutes of running.

If a runner uses a standing desk at work for eight hours a day, that could cause as much joint loading as walking nearly a full marathon distance (approximated from 8 hours of walking at 1.3 m/s) or <4.5 hours of running at an easy pace.)

This shows that nonrunning physical activity can contribute substantially to the daily, total cumulative mechanical loading of musculoskeletal tissues

Through this analysis, it is recommended that runners quantify the frequency and types of nonrunning physical activity they participate in on a daily and weekly basis, particularly when evaluating an injury. When working with a running physical therapist to treat an injury, discuss your other physical activity to provide the specialist with a full picture.

If you want to avoid running injury, you need to be aware of all physical activity you participate in daily. Take that into consideration as you consider your training regime.

Questions about a recent running injury? Contact us to discuss your options.