Everyone knows how to run, right? It’s just a question of putting one foot in front of the other. And if we get injured – an unfortunate fact of running life – we pop along to the physio (if we’re good), get some handson treatment, are told to increase our strength and conditioning (which we occasionally do – if we’re really good), eventually recover, and then head back out again. We run. We get injured again. We recuperate. We run.

But what if this wasn’t a fact of running life? What if there’s something about the way we run that makes us get injured? And what if we could change the way we ran to minimise our risk of getting injured?

Over the last six months, I have been meeting up with The Running School and have had nothing short of a Damascene conversion. I have niggles aplenty and a history of injuries reaching back decades, mostly on one side, and was pretty sceptical about anything being done about it. I just thought I had to cope with it – that it was my cross to bear.

A new fact of life 

“We started as rehabilitation specialists,” says Mike Antoniades, The Running School’s rehab and performance director. “We saw a link between injury prevention and running rehabilitation.”

The mindblowing breakthrough here is that runners who attend the clinic are assessed holistically. Rather than concentrating on the area of injury, Mike is interested in how runners are running, and how they got an injury in the first place.

“We analyse movement patterns and re-educate people as to how to use their movement patterns,” he says. “Just treating pain is only one element of what we do. The second element is re-educating individuals so they don’t get re-injured.”

And their success rate is phenomenal: Richard Bricknell, head of physiotherapy, says, “We found that we had only a 30 per cent success rate in reducing injury, even though the clinical reasoning was correct.” So they started looking at what the reasons were for this low success rate. “When we looked at technique/running patterns we realised a lot of the problem was neurological. Once we developed our re-education programme, we had a 70 per cent success rate with our physiotherapy.” 70 per cent!

Education is key 

So what’s the secret to this success? Chris Kay, head of rehabilitation at The Running School in Bristol, says, “The first thing physios used to say to a runner is ‘stop running’ – and runners hate that! Instead of telling them to stop, we find a way to modify exercise without pain, while progressing treatment. We use walking, walking backwards, running in a pool, strength work and training – exercise-based rehab.”