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    Managing Your Lifestyle & Running Load Home / Blog / Managing Your Lifestyle & Running Load
    Posted by Dr Fiona McIntyre (Osteopath), 24 Jan 2022
    Blog
    The body is always trying to stay balanced. The official term for this is allostasis: your ability to maintain stability in a constantly changing environment. It’s not just the external environment that matters—your nervous system and hormones play a big role too. When you’re healthy, your body makes lots of small adjustments all the time. But when you’re exposed to long?term stress, such as emotional stress from work or physical stress from marathon training, your body has to work much harder to keep everything in balance.

    Injuries are multifactorial

    This is why it’s important to think of injuries as multifactorial. It’s easy to blame one thing, like a new pair of shoes that seems to have aggravated your Achilles after a run. But to properly address the issue—and help prevent future injuries—you need to consider all relevant factors. For example, maybe you also hadn’t been sleeping well because of a big work deadline.
    This broader view is especially important for people who do long?distance sports such as running.

    Running, lifestyle and injury risk

    Running usually involves a structured plan: building up training, tapering before a race, then resting afterwards. Because the sport is so repetitive and ongoing, lifestyle factors really matter.
    Whether you’re doing a weekly 5 km parkrun or training for a marathon, things like:
    • Late nights
    • Poor sleep
    • High stress
    • Alcohol before a long run
    can all reduce your body’s capacity to recover and make you more prone to injury.
    “Managing the load of life is just as important as following a structured training plan.”

    Managing training load

    From a training perspective, managing load can be quite straightforward if you track it. You can use an app like Strava, or simply pen and paper.
    Key things to monitor:
    • Weekly distance or time spent running
    • Pace (especially if you’re adding speed sessions)
    • Terrain (flat vs hills, road vs trail)
    If you increase your running too quickly, your body’s tissues may struggle to adapt, and injury risk goes up. Tendons in particular don’t like sudden changes. They transfer energy from muscles to bones and are crucial for speed and changes of pace—but they also take time and patience to settle if irritated.
    A common guideline is:
    • Increase your total weekly load by no more than ~10%
    • Change only one factor at a time (distance, pace or terrain)

    Tracking lifestyle as part of your plan

    Alongside your training, it helps to track lifestyle factors to see the full picture.
    You can:
    • Rate each run out of 10 for how hard it felt (Rate of Perceived Exertion, or RPE)
    • Note how much and how well you slept
    • Record other activities (e.g. dog walking, playing with kids, other sports)
    RPE has been shown to be as useful as heart rate for monitoring training load. If your runs suddenly feel much harder, it may be a sign that life stress, poor sleep or extra activity is affecting your recovery.
    Sleep is a great place to start. If you’re an early?morning runner, keeping a consistent bedtime and wake time makes those early starts easier and supports better recovery.

    Don’t forget “hidden” load

    Other daily activities also add to your overall load:
    • Walking the dog after a run
    • Long days on your feet at work
    • Running around after kids
    These are all extra time on your legs. They’re not “bad” and shouldn’t be avoided, but they do need to be factored into your overall training and recovery.

    The bottom line

    Being aware of how your lifestyle and training interact is one of the simplest ways to reduce injury risk. When you understand how sleep, stress, work, family life and running all fit together, you can adjust more intelligently. That means fewer injuries, better recovery—and more time doing what you love out on the road or trail.
    Need more help? Book in with an Osteopath HERE.

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