Hi everyone, Doug Adams here from Run DNA Podcast, excited for another episode in season two. It's been a busy summer and there's been some pretty big milestones. Actually, a lot of it happened in the past week or so, maybe two weeks. And I wanted to share some of those things that, especially some things I thought would not be necessarily related, but luckily for me, they were. So I wanted to share a couple of those big milestones and some lessons about the truth about injury recovery. So the first big milestone that I hit is related to that injury recovery. And I ran a trail race this past weekend. with a good bit of elevation gain and descent. And I made the same foolish mistake that most racers do and barreled down some of the hills. And luckily I didn't pay the consequence. I actually, as some of you may know, I had a knee injury that I was dealing with for a while. And I didn't even realize until three days after the race that I didn't have knee pain during the race or after the race. It was when I was talking to Caitlin from Omega Project here, one of our other physical therapists. She asked me how my knee was feeling after the race, and I was like, fine, why do you ask? And it took me a while to realize that I hadn't thought about my knee before it, during it, after it. And that is a huge thing. If you've ever dealt with an injury, the way I describe it, it's almost like wearing a pair of tinted glasses. you view the world as being something that's going to either hurt the knee or help the knee or whatever injury you have. But it feels like I don't have those glasses on anymore because I didn't even think about that going into the race or coming out of it. Now, my quads are still a little sore, but that's another story. And maybe my race strategy of running sub five minute pace down near three quarter mile descent might not be the best decision but that's a whole different podcast that we could talk about so that's big announcement number one is big milestone that I ran a race and didn't have any knee pain and that's been over a year since I've been able to say that so that's a big deal For me personally, at least, I'm going to share some lessons about that later, but I'm going to tell you the second one first about what that is. And the second big milestone is that we completed the level one certified walking gate analyst course and a whole new walking gate analysis protocol for Helix three date. This is something we've been working on for years, and I am so thrilled with how it's come together, even better than I even thought. But I'm going to tell you why these two things are related as I share some of my story and some of the truths that I've learned from dealing with an injury myself that has affected me for a long time. And although I never want to get injured, it's things that I've learned that helped me with my own clients and working with people and athletes that are dealing with injuries themselves. So I wanted to share some of that and go into some of the things I'm excited to hopefully share things that will help other people deal with injuries or help the people that they're helping get back from injuries. so just a little refresher on the injury itself I had a semi trauma caused injury where I slammed my knee hard down into the ground and I partially tore my patellar tendon that was in february of I think I mentioned that on a couple podcasts before talking about the what that injury was and I probably mentioned how I was not the smartest person for the first couple months. I thought that I must have just irritated a bursa and I'll push through it. I think I was training for a MRF at the time and was doing a ton of squats and I was running with a weighted vest on and probably all the things I should not have been doing for a partially torn patellar tendon. Who knows, maybe I led to a partially tear just because I was not being smart, but I wouldn't really acknowledge that I was injured, just kind of kept going. And that was not smart. But then, you know, fast forward, I finally figured out that I needed to take this injury seriously and address it. And I had to even... not run in one of my favorite places in the world to run when I was on a work trip out in Switzerland and couldn't go for a run or do anything because I had not been smart before. Probably should have just taken care of the injury right away, but that led to a longer term with it. So then the rehab journey, I've learned a lot and we could probably talk a lot just about what I did and the specifics and how I addressed it. But there were a couple of big lessons that really stood out that I think we don't always talk about. And we've talked about knee injuries before and anterior knee pain is not always a partial tear of the tendon, but there's a lot of runners that experience knee pain, especially in the anterior aspect of it. And I think there's some lessons here beyond just the rehab that we did that really do matter to talk about. The first lesson that I'll share is that it does take way longer than you think. I did not think that in nearly the end of twenty twenty four, after already having had ten months of an injury in twenty twenty three, that I would still be thinking about that or even considering that I had a knee injury. I turned forty this past summer, which could also be considered a milestone, but I realized I don't heal quite as quickly as I used to, but I didn't realize that some of these injuries do take a long time. A lot of that will depend on the tissue that's involved. We know that tendons can take a lot longer and they need consistent loading for nine months or more for it And that kind of goes into the next lesson. So if lesson one takes way longer, lesson two is that consistency really is the key. Early on, I would try to do these large efforts to get myself back quickly. I was getting treatment from great professionals, treating myself, throwing everything at it, the entire kitchen sink at it. I was doing gait retraining. I was doing strength training. I would do everything. But sometimes you can't speed up healing timeframes and it needs consistent efforts. And flashes in the pan are not necessarily going to get you the results that they want. They might jumpstart things and be a catalyst for that. But we really, truly need consistent efforts with this. So since I braced that and realized that this wasn't going to be a two- or three-week injury, I haven't missed doing my eccentric knee extension machine for at least four to five months now, even when traveling. I will find a way to do it. I am consistent with doing that and loading that patellar tendon, making sure that my quads are strong. I think I could be a lot more sore now. to you know today than I normally would be after race just because I have been so consistent about strengthening my quads and making sure that I'm supporting that knee And it's about not missing. And now there is a James Clear quote that I do really like. And he says, never miss twice. And I think that's important for us to consider because we are going to miss once in a while. And that's fine. But don't miss twice. Don't let yourself fall off the bandwagon because you missed once. Make sure if you miss, you adjust. And his other quote from James Clear, you guys probably hear me quote him a lot because I get his newsletter. And I've read his book, Atomic Habits. I love a lot of what he does. But he says, every action is a vote for the type of person that I want to be. And that really resonates with injuries as well. If you want to be healthy, if you want to get back to running, then you really do need to be consistent with doing the things that are going to get you the results. And a big part of that is knowing what those things are because we don't have all the time in the world. I've got three kids, two businesses. I'm not able to really spend a lot of time doing this. But focusing on the key aspects and identifying it, that's a lot of what we teach in our courses, the personalization and why that really matters. But it takes consistency. The other thing that was important for consistency with me was actually just really giving myself time to get back to my prior activity level. I used a coach and you may have heard some of those episodes. If you listen to season one, Drew Hunter got on and gave me some really great advice about how to get back to running higher volume. and again I was looking for a little bit of the quick fix of all right I want to run this time I want to do this and I want to get back to this training volume and he just says just get back to running five days a week and try to get twenty five thirty miles in and admittedly it took me a long time to get back up to that especially at some of the paces I used to do to get back into a zone two that I had previously done prior to the injury around eight minutes per mile that took a long time and I had to be really consistent about hitting week after week of five days a week running hitting thirty sometimes thirty five or even forty miles in a week depending on what I was doing and when I did that I saw a lot more results because I was consistently doing the training I was doing it as I was supposed to because I think a lot of times consistently doing the wrong thing can be not beneficial for you here. We have to consistently do the thing that we know is right and be patient with it as we're going. And then third lesson, this is where I'm going to tie back the second milestone that I talked about with the walking course. And this is where I think it's very easy to get some tunnel vision and miss this aspect when we're trying to recover for injuries. And that lesson is that you have to control all of the stress. I did a lot of focus on my running gait. I did a lot of focus on my strength. I was looking to find any way that I could really help myself out and get that edge so that I could heal back better or faster. But I was still having pain, honestly, up until about three months ago in June of twenty twenty four. So now, you know, was that sixteen weeks, sixteen months after the original injury? I was still having pain. I couldn't kneel on my knee. I couldn't run properly. higher, faster speeds without feeling some of the knee pain. If I did a track workout, I would still feel it. Even though my running form was pretty good, even though I had worked on strength consistently, I'm still having it. So where the second milestone come in is that we were developing the walking course and the walking analysis for Helix Redate. And as we started to get some of the beta versions of Helix three D walking analysis, I was of course the test subject. I was patient zero. And one of the things that we did for walking is we added a score and I'm really happy with how this came out because the score looks at how close you are to normal walking mechanics. And that's really helpful because lower is better with a score. And it goes up to infinity, potentially, depending on how jacked up your walking is with some of that. So my score when we were developing it was a ten. And I thought, oh man, maybe I, I didn't did something wrong with the algorithm. Maybe there was some math error, things like that. Like I'm, I'm doing pretty well. I, you know, I'm not, uh, I didn't feel like I was having any pain walking around. I didn't feel like I had changed my mechanics. I should be a lot lower score than that. And then we started getting some other test subjects and their scores were three, four, two. We started seeing some of these low scores. And then we brought in some people that we knew had some injuries. We started comparing to people that had recently had a total knee or had had an Achilles injury and their scores were in the eight to fifteen range. Or we brought in some people that were very limited in their community ambulation and they were in the twenty range. So I started looking at the company that I had with a score and saying, wow, I'm I'm close to like somebody that had a total knee. And it started making me realize that I really wasn't controlling all of the stress that my knee was going under. I had focused so much on my running and my strength, but I wasn't looking at one of the most functional things that I do on a daily basis, which is walking. And so when I did the walking analysis, what I saw was that there were some asymmetries and some deviations from normal walking mechanics. So specifically for me, when I was walking, I wasn't getting full or near full extension of my knee at initial contact. So I was landing with a partially bent knee, which could put some increased stress on the front of the knee. And then my loading of the knee was different when I walked, and I wasn't getting even that full terminal knee extension as we progressed from loading response to mid-stance, that I had changed my mechanics. And I wasn't loading the knee equally. And it was probably contributing to some of the reasons that I was still having knee pain. Because every step I'm taking, every time I'm walking somewhere, just even day to day walking, I was putting more stress on that knee. So it was a great opportunity. I was testing out all of the coursework and the materials that we created and the algorithm and what we had done. And I did some gateway training. I did some specific mobility work. I focused on my walking. I changed some of the mechanics. And I was able to say I got my score down to like a three with it. And when I got down to a three, I saw that that was significantly improved for those things that I noted. And what I saw with that is my knee, I didn't even realize it kind of just as it happened, I started having less pain where when I did a track session, I no longer had pain. And then a couple months later, after I had fixed some of my walking mechanics, I just ran a race that should be very challenging on the knee with a lot of descent, fast descent, rocky terrain. It had rained the night before, so it was wet ground, and I really didn't have to think about it. So I didn't think that bringing together our walking – And on a professional level with Run DNA would have an impact on my ability to run without pain, but it did. And it just really showed me that there is such a need to address the whole person. And a lot of people that are runners or athletes that run for their sport, if we're not addressing all of the potential situations where they could be putting stress on their involved body segment there, that can really contribute to it. And that's where I had to address my walking mechanics. And not everyone's going to have walking necessarily be that, but it is something that we should check with everyone because it is one of the things that is the most functional thing we're going to do on a consistent basis with. So if you're dealing with an injury like I was, or you're helping other people deal with an injury, let them know that it's important to be patient. And if you identify the right things to do and focus on that and be consistent with it, you're going to get results and it's going to get better. But finally, when you're addressing these things, you do have to look at everything. And you have to be open to realizing that maybe you do have to look at your walking, or you should look at some jumping mechanics, or if you've addressed their running and their walking and you're not looking at their cutting, you need to look at the mechanics there. Our body is amazing in its ability to compensate, But it's not always the best at knowing when to stop compensating. And we adopt this new normal for our movement patterns. And if left unchecked, that can have a big significant value or impact on our life. In that certified Walking Gate Analyst course, we present some studies just about how symmetry affects things, how it can affect bone mineral density, how that can contribute to people later in life getting a total knee replacement because they didn't know that they changed their mechanics. And if you're a provider that is used to working with people, a question I get all the time is, why the right side? Why this? Why that? And as providers, we can start to show some short-term things that, well, you don't have as much knee motion here and you're You're not as strong. But I think we can look even further back and say, well, if I had looked at you twenty, thirty years ago about how your walking pattern was, maybe I would have a better answer for you. Maybe I would understand a little bit more of what was going on if we had looked at some of those things and addressed some of those compensations that we didn't even know were there. So hopefully this is something that helps other people, whether you're dealing with that injury or you're helping others. Just make sure you're looking at everything. Be patient and be consistent and you'll get results. So thanks as always for listening to the Run DNA podcast. I wish you all a happy, healthy, and long life.