Hey, it's Jennifer, I just want to take a minute to talk about exercising while you're sick. There's a lot of stuff going around right now, and a lot of people ask, “Should I be working out when I'm sick? Should I not? Should I rest up? What should I do?” I feel like people tend to be on one side of the spectrum or the other - they either don't do anything and rest up as much as you can, or they try to sweat it out and get the sickness out of them that way. The truth is: one, usually there is a middle ground, and two, it depends on what you've got. This isn't doctor's advice, or anything, so i ..read more

IT-band pain is the second most common running injury behind patellofemoral pain. It’s much more common in men (~75%), novice runners and individuals that increase mileage/intensity too quickly. It’s the number one injury with trail runners; likely due to the amount of downhill and single-leg track running (both things that load the IT-band). We used to believe that IT-band pain was a friction injury from the IT-band rubbing back and forth on the outside of the knee and treatment often consisted of stretching, foam rolling, and soft tissue massage. Our understanding has evolved that it is act ..read more

I'm going to talk to you all today about balance: why it's important if you're a runner, some changes that can happen to your balance if you are postpartum, and, if you do find some deficits, how you can work on your balance. Balance is important as a runner, because if you have decreased balance, it can lead to some compensations in your running form, which means you're less efficient, and that means more work for your pelvic floor to do. If you have impact while you're running, and you have additional balance issues that can lead to or exacerbate problems like leaking or prolapse-type sympto ..read more

Hey everyone, I wanted to spend just a little bit of time today talking about your calf muscles, and why it should be a priority if you are a runner. When we think about running, and strength training, we often hear a lot about strengthening our hips, and our glutes and making sure we have a really strong glute meade, which is important, but oftentimes, our calf muscles get overlooked. They should really be a top priority for us as they absorb a significant amount of load from the ground and they also help propel us forward. They're really the powerhouse of running. When we think about when we ..read more

If you are returning to run postpartum, we have talked about in some previous blogs, looking at assessing your strength postpartum, and then assessing your balance as well. The third thing I look at is impact. We want to assess our body's ability to respond to impact before we start our return to run, because running is just impact. We want to make sure our bodies have the ability to respond and absorb that impact, and tolerate the pressures that come with running. I'm going to take you through the assessment that I take individuals through in the clinic to get an idea of what their tolerance ..read more

Hi, this is Jennifer. Today I want to talk about knee pain and how sometimes working on your feet can actually help with your knee. The knee often is the victim of things going on in the hip. You can check out the blog on the Glute Meade, if that's something you're interested in learning about. Sometimes, though, the knee is also the victim of the feet of you just kind of stand and shift your weight towards the inside of your foot, or the arch and then out towards the outside of your foot back and forth, you can feel how that changes the distribution of your weight at your knee. If this is you ..read more

Hey, it's Jennifer, I want to talk today about what you should be shooting for with pull ups and what good indicators are that, even if you can get your chin over the bar, maybe a band or a box, or some sort of assistance would be useful to help you maintain good technique. A lot of people, including myself, tend to do what I call spank pull ups which is when you're hanging on the bar and the first thing you do is kind of arch up to get the chin over the bar. You’re in this arch position and you kind of get yourself up with the arch. That’s not what we're looking for when you want a pull up wi ..read more

When you are postpartum and you are making the decision of whether or not you're feeling like you're ready to return to run, one thing that can be really helpful to look at is just your basic strength. When I'm working with my postpartum clients in the clinic, we go through a full readiness screen, and one part of that screen is strength. I'm going to take you all through what I look at, so if you're at home, and you want to see if you are strong enough to start your return to run program, these are some things you could do. We know as you go through the pregnancy process, your body changes dr ..read more

One thing you can do to help make yourself more resilient is plyometric training. It’s one area that I see runners missing in their program. Plyometrics is just jumping and that's basically what running is: you are taking a bunch of single- leg jumps over and over again. Our muscles, our tendons and our bones need to be able to absorb that load from the ground. When we think about incorporating plyometric training into what you're doing already, it can be two times a week maximum, and the number of foot contacts are really minimal. If you're a beginner, anywhere between 30 and 50 reps 30-50 ti ..read more

I'm going to take you through a really quick core strength sequence that I like to use with runners. You could tack this on to the end of your run, or maybe the beginning as a warm up. As runners, we obviously want to have a strong core, but we also want to think of working on things that can get us on one leg. Running is a single-leg activity, so I think taking some of your basic core exercises that you may have done before, and doing them on one leg is a good way you can make them a little more running specific. I'm going to take you through a sequence of exercises. We're going to do them st ..read more