Those who know this sport insist that a series of guidelines must be followed in order to avoid injuries and bad practices.
Running is a sport that can give us many joys. Like other disciplines, running will help us improve our health, keep our bodies active, keep us fitter and, in addition, we will also get psychological benefits.However, like any other activity, there are also bad practices, mistakes that we can make by wanting to do things too fast or simply out of ignorance. Sometimes these mistakes are very basic things that we overlook and that can have a crucial effect on our performance or, even worse, cause injuries and major ailments that will not allow us to continue enjoying the miles.
We have already seen a series of tips to start running and, in fact, the following running mistakes are also part of these recommendations: they are behaviors that we should not imitate if we want to have a healthy sporting life.
Haste is not a good companion
The first of these is the most basic, but also the most common mistake made by beginner runners: wanting to go too far and too fast. When we start running, we do it with a certain euphoria, but we also have mixed feelings. On the one hand, we get tired easily and we don’t have much endurance, but on the other hand we feel great, it’s a new stimulus, our body responds and the satisfaction after each run is wonderful.
This is a double-edged sword, because we tend to run more and more kilometers, we want to go further, run for longer and, in addition, forcing this great machine that we have for body to do everything faster. Mistake. Calm down, the progression must be constant, increasing the mileage very little by little when we start. The most important thing at the beginning is to allow your body to adapt.
Respecting breaks is also training
The second mistake in running is conditioned by the previous one: not respecting rest days. Whether or not you have an established training plan, recovery days are mandatory and, believe it or not, those days are also training. Yes, rest is training, it is letting our body recover and adapt to these new stimuli. Not resting properly can lead to injuries and overtraining, which we will talk about next.
Hydration and poor nutrition
During training, our body suffers wear and tear and we must be aware of this. Hydration in summer plays a vital role, with rising temperatures it is essential that we accompany our running outings with a drink to recover fluids. However, when the thermometer drops and winter arrives, hydration while running does not lose its importance.
The cold weather makes us feel that we don’t need to hydrate, and runners who are less prone to sweating even forget to drink, but we must always remember how important it is, especially on long runs. Similarly, not taking care of your nutrition is also a mistake, not only during training but also on a day-to-day basis. By eating more and healthier you will also improve as a runner. Don’t forget that when you do sport, your energy consumption also increases, so you need to give your body the fuel it needs to continue to perform.
Blindly relying on generic trainings
We live in an age where we can find literally anything on the internet, and that also includes hundreds, thousands of training plans to beat such and such a time or run so many kilometers. Workouts for 5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon, plans to get started in trail running and thousands of other variations.
Obviously, all these workouts have not been created specifically for you, they have not taken into account your personal peculiarities to elaborate them. You have to be very aware of this. Running training must be individual and personalized. Of course, not all of us can afford the monitoring and advice of a personal trainer, but at least we can adapt what we see online to our needs. Are the paces of that plan too demanding or do you feel too tired? Adapt it to you, it’s not an unbreakable law.
Most of these mistakes are very easy to avoid with simple common sense. Making them can lead to poor performance, stagnation in our progress as runners, discomfort and injury, and even overtraining, which can translate into habitual fatigue, appetite disturbance, poor rest and mood disorders.
