Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Beyond Biomechanics: Stepping Away from Structuralism to Sensible Training and Tolerance with Endurance Athletes
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Beyond Biomechanics: Stepping Away from Structuralism to Sensible Training and Tolerance with Endurance Athletes
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mskmag.substack.com
Therapists treating runners, cyclists, or triathletes can often feel frustrated when athletes keep breaking down despite everyone’s best efforts.
I now work exclusively with endurance athletes and have spent recent years helping therapists understand how these people tick - and how we can help them more effectively.
For decades, we were trained to think in terms of structure and mechanics: weak glutes, flat feet, overpronation, knee valgus, tight calves. The logic was simple: find the fault, fix it, prevent injury, boost performance.
But if you’ve noticed that ‘fixing the fault’ doesn’t always stop injuries, you’re discovering a bigger truth: endurance athletes rarely get injured because of one (or many) mechanical flaws. More often, tissues simply weren’t ready for the training and competition load demanded of them.
Biomechanics is always a hot topic and sometimes worth exploring, but it’s not what I see most therapists struggle with, other than trying to direct the athlete’s beliefs away from it. The real sticking point is how we talk with athletes about tissue and load tolerance - and how to use that in rehab and/or management of their ongoing training and racing.
Many clinicians tell me, “I know biomechanics isn’t the whole story anymore, but I don’t know how to explain load and tissue tolerance to athletes or use it in rehab.”
This article is for you. We’ll look at why biomechanics isn’t enough, what tissue tolerance really means, and how to guide endurance athletes with simple, effective load-based strategies.
Why the Biomechanical Lens Falls Short
I remember the late ’90s and early 2000s: weekends spent on CPD courses, watching people walk across paper runways so I could hunt for ‘flaws’ and prescribe foam padding, orthoses, or elaborate corrective exercises for obscure muscles. I thought I was an expert. Sometimes patients improved, but often they didn’t.
As my reasoning evolved, I questioned everything. If biomechanics didn’t consistently fix problems, why were some athletes improving while others weren’t?
View all episodes
By Physio MattersThis is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit mskmag.substack.com
Therapists treating runners, cyclists, or triathletes can often feel frustrated when athletes keep breaking down despite everyone’s best efforts.
I now work exclusively with endurance athletes and have spent recent years helping therapists understand how these people tick - and how we can help them more effectively.
For decades, we were trained to think in terms of structure and mechanics: weak glutes, flat feet, overpronation, knee valgus, tight calves. The logic was simple: find the fault, fix it, prevent injury, boost performance.
But if you’ve noticed that ‘fixing the fault’ doesn’t always stop injuries, you’re discovering a bigger truth: endurance athletes rarely get injured because of one (or many) mechanical flaws. More often, tissues simply weren’t ready for the training and competition load demanded of them.
Biomechanics is always a hot topic and sometimes worth exploring, but it’s not what I see most therapists struggle with, other than trying to direct the athlete’s beliefs away from it. The real sticking point is how we talk with athletes about tissue and load tolerance - and how to use that in rehab and/or management of their ongoing training and racing.
Many clinicians tell me, “I know biomechanics isn’t the whole story anymore, but I don’t know how to explain load and tissue tolerance to athletes or use it in rehab.”
This article is for you. We’ll look at why biomechanics isn’t enough, what tissue tolerance really means, and how to guide endurance athletes with simple, effective load-based strategies.
Why the Biomechanical Lens Falls Short
I remember the late ’90s and early 2000s: weekends spent on CPD courses, watching people walk across paper runways so I could hunt for ‘flaws’ and prescribe foam padding, orthoses, or elaborate corrective exercises for obscure muscles. I thought I was an expert. Sometimes patients improved, but often they didn’t.
As my reasoning evolved, I questioned everything. If biomechanics didn’t consistently fix problems, why were some athletes improving while others weren’t?