If you’re a regular runner, or you play a sport that involves a lot of running such as football, rugby, hockey, netball etc, there’s a decent chance that you’ll have suffered a calf injury in the past. They’re common, but the good news is that they’re generally easy to repair and don’t keep you out for too long.
An even better approach is to prevent them before they become an issue in the first place. So the purpose of our blog today is to give you five basic, actionable tips to make calf injuries a thing of the past.
Follow these tips for calf injury prevention!
Calf muscle anatomy
Without going into super detail about the calf muscle anatomy, we’ll give a quick overview so you can understand the different structures we’re dealing with. We’re not going to involved Achilles issues here - we’re sticking to muscle injuries only.
The calf is actually two muscles, the gastrocnemius and the soleus. Often the two are confused when it comes to injuries, but there’s a quick way to tell them apart.
If you’ve strained your soleus, you’ll only be able to feel it when you stretch your calf muscles with a bent knee. So if you bend your leg, then perform a calf stretch and you feel discomfort, you’ve injured your soleus. If you can feel discomfort in the calf when it is stretched with a straight leg, it’s the gastrocnemius.
There are several reasons why the calf muscles can become injured, and all of the usual suspects are to blame… over training, lack of stretching, unsuitable footwear, lack of strength training etc. By addressing these issues, you can reduce your frequency of calf injuries significantly.
Here’s a few simple tips…
Tip #1 - Train the muscles properly
Stronger muscles are more resistant to injury than weaker muscles. There’s no surprise there, so you might be wondering why this is so important, if it’s so obvious?
The answer is because not many people train their calf muscles directly, but even fewer train them properly.
When you train your calf muscles, you need to ensure you perform exercises with both a straight leg and a bent leg to hit the gastrocnemius and the soleus. You also have to lift through a wider range of reps, so you’ll perform some high rep, low weight exercises and some low rep, high weight exercises.
This ticks all boxes and ensures you train both muscles properly. Here’s a couple of exercises I recommend…
#Tip 2 - Stretch your muscles properly
Muscles can get tight and short for various reasons. A heavy training schedule, footwear (people who wear heels all day often have very tight calf muscles), lots of time spent on their feet etc. They all add up, so in order to prevent this from becoming an issue, you need to stretch effectively.
If you were to run 10km, you’d be taking between 6,000 and 8,000 steps depending on your stride length. This means per 10km run you’ll be using each of your calf muscles 3,000 - 4,000 times each. This doesn’t include the steps you’ve accumulated throughout the day generally either.
The point is, they’ll be doing a lot of work, so they’ll need a lot of stretching. Here’s a couple of good ones…
Tip #3 - Warm up your calf muscles properly in the cold
In the cold weather your risk of muscle tissue damage increases significantly. The solution to this problem is to spend enough time warming up, or wearing appropriate clothing when you’re playing a sport or running outside.
The cold weather restricts blood flow, which in turn limits tissue elasticity. This is the root cause of the tissue damage risk. If you go straight from the cold weather to high intensity exercise, the risk is significant, but the good news is that it’s easily avoidable.
Start any activity with aa gentle ‘loosener’ - 5 minutes or so of very low intensity cardio, before stepping it up and doing more activity-specific work. This is dependent on the demands of the activity you’re about to perform. For example, if you’re about to perform a sport where jumping is going to be required, start with low level jumps.
If you’ll need to sprint, gradually build up your speed with short duration sprints of increasing distance and speed. This progressive form of training will reduce your risk of injury and improve your performance in the activity you’re about to perform.
Follow these calf injury prevention tips, and you’ll make calf injuries a thing of the past.
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