When training for a race, from a 10k to a marathon, it can be daunting to look at your training plan and count up the miles you’ll be clocking each week. Do you have the time? You may have only just started and are already wondering if you can get away with missing a run here and there if you’re busy or worse… it’s raining.But the importance of the gradual build up of miles and long runs each week is not solely about your fitness and being able to push through ‘the wall’ and finish the race. It’s also about finishing (and starting) the race in one piece, injury free.An area of research that has seen a lot of progress in recent years has been the understanding of load management within training and the importance it plays in injury prevention (Windt & Gabbett, 2016). The widely accepted guide to boosting your training volume is the 10 percent rule, and recent research has been delving into that so called “sweet spot” to find out just how much you should be increasing each week.Gabbett’s (2016) research tells us that upping your training too quickly has an increasingly detrimental effect on injury prevalence. The ‘go hard or go home’ attitude of many ultra runners has to be kept in check in order to keep them within their own ‘sweet spot’, and it’s worth reminding yourself not to undervalue low intensity and recovery sessions within your own training plan (Forsdyke et al, 2016).Having said that, as a physio we know that getting runners to acknowledge and understand the importance of load management doesn’t necessarily mean it will have any influence of change on the athletes training. Runners, and especially competitive athletes need to understand that the pros of modifying their training load outweigh the cons…

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