If you’ve been running for more than a year, chances are you’ve been injured at least once. Shin splints, runner’s knee, dodgy Achilles, tight ITB, plantar fasciitis. You take a week off, it settles down, you start running again, and within a month something else flares up. Sound familiar?
Here’s the reality. Around 50% of runners get injured every single year. That’s not bad luck. That’s a pattern. And the pattern almost always comes down to the same handful of things that nobody is properly addressing.
Overuse Injuries
Running Injuries
Rehab from Home
Most running injuries are not caused by what you think they are. It’s rarely your shoes. It’s rarely your form. It’s almost never that one specific run where you “felt something pull.”
What it usually is: doing too much, too soon, with a body that doesn’t have the capacity to handle the load you’re asking it to handle.
Running is a repetitive impact sport. Every single stride sends a force equivalent to two to three times your bodyweight through your legs. Over a 5km run, that’s roughly 5000 to 6000 impacts. If your calves, glutes, hips and tendons aren’t strong enough to absorb and redirect that force, something further down the chain has to compensate. That’s where the injuries come from.
Most runners I see have done a heap of running and almost no strength work. They’ve built cardiovascular fitness way faster than their tissues can keep up with. The engine is too big for the chassis.
The Other Big Culprit: Training Load
The second biggest factor is how you’re structuring your weeks. The classic mistake is ramping up too quickly. You feel good, the weather’s nice, a half marathon is coming up, so you jump from 25km a week to 50km in a fortnight. Your fitness can handle it. Your tissues cannot.
The general rule is to increase weekly mileage by no more than around 10% per week, with a recovery week every 3 to 4 weeks where you drop back down. This isn’t sexy advice but it’s what the research keeps showing. Runners who progress gradually get injured significantly less often than runners who push hard and hope for the best.
Why "Rest And See" Doesn't Work
Here’s what most runners do when something starts hurting. They take a week off. The pain settles. They start running again. The pain comes back. They rest longer. Repeat.
The problem with this approach is that rest alone doesn’t change the underlying issue. If your glutes were weak before the injury, they’re still weak after a week off. If your calf complex couldn’t handle the load before, it still can’t. You’re returning to the exact same body that broke down, expecting a different outcome.
Real recovery means using the time off to actually fix what caused the problem in the first place. Strengthen the weak links. Address the movement patterns that are loading the wrong structures. Then build back up properly so the same injury doesn’t reappear in six weeks.
What Actually Keeps Runners On The Road
Three things, in order of importance.
First, strength training. Two sessions a week of proper lower body and core strength work, focusing on calves, glutes, quads and hip stability. This is the single biggest thing the research backs for reducing running injuries. It doesn’t have to be a 90 minute gym session. 30 to 40 minutes of focused work, done consistently, makes an enormous difference.
Second, smart load progression. Building mileage gradually, including easy runs at genuinely easy pace, and not doing every run at the same moderate intensity. Most amateur runners run too hard on their easy days and not hard enough on their hard days.
Third, addressing niggles before they become injuries. That little twinge in your Achilles at kilometre 6 is information. Ignoring it for three weeks until you can barely walk is how a 2 week issue becomes a 4 month one.
Where Physio Comes In
A good running physio does more than just rub the sore bit. They look at how you actually move, where your weak links are, what your training week looks like, and what’s specifically driving your pattern of injuries. Then they build a plan that addresses the cause, not just the symptom.
That’s what we do at Revive Physiotherapy. We come to your home across Sydney’s Inner West, Eastern Suburbs and Lower North Shore, so you can get proper assessment and rehab without losing half your evening to traffic and parking. We work with everyone from weekend parkrun regulars to people training for their first marathon, and we focus on getting you back on the road properly so you stay there.
Book a home visit with Revive Physiotherapy and let's get your running sustainable.
If you’re stuck in the rest, run, repeat, re-injury cycle, the answer isn’t more rest. It’s actually working out what’s driving the problem and fixing it properly.
Mobile physio across the Inner West, Eastern Suburbs and Lower North Shore