Injury Free Running

A no-nonsense guide for runners, trainers, and health professionals that shows how an understanding of anatomy combined with the latest in strengthening exercises can enhance injury-free running performance.

Each time a runner’s foot hits the ground, an impact force averaging three times their weight travels through the body at more than 200 miles per hour, causing the bones to vibrate and tendons to stretch. An average runner strikes the ground more than 10,000 times per hour, resulting in a remarkable amount of force to the body.

But the truth is those impact forces need not be as harmful as they sound. In Injury-Free Running, Tom Michaud explains how an understanding of anatomy and biomechanics, coupled with the latest strengthening exercises and rehab protocols, can keep runners injury free. By modifying our running form and engaging specific exercises to improve tendon resiliency, we can learn to store and return energy more efficiently while also running faster and with less effort.

In this revised second edition, the author shows how to:

• Perform an at-home gait analysis to improve performance.

• Identify problems with strength, flexibility, and/or neuromotor coordination.

• Incorporate new exercises that enhance energy storage and return it to the tendons.

• Treat the 25 most common running-related injuries with the most scientifically justified.

• Treatment protocols.

• Select the running shoe that best suits your needs.

With over 200 illustrations and 300 references, this book is ideal for recreational runners, as well as physical therapists, trainers, chiropractors, and sports medicine practitioners.

Since graduating from Western States Chiropractic College in 1982, Tom Michaud has published numerous book chapters and dozens of journal articles on subjects ranging from the treatment of tibial stress fractures in runners to the conservative management of shoulder injuries in baseball players.