What do we mean when we say "Listen to your body"

As usual great information Jason. I agree 100% of what was detailed in that post. Thank you for sharing that info. On a side note I signed up for a course here in town about coaching runners, currently on the waiting list. If I do get in I will let you know how that turned out.

De-lurking to say that I liked the article but as a physiotherapist I think "Listen to your body" is terrible advice for newbie runners. I cringe when I hear someone giving this advice. I've seen so many newbies insist that they were listening to their bodies and all the while they were over-reaching their training until they broke on one long run or speed interval too many. Then they take weeks off, insisting that it was the shoes or the trail or they were dehydrated that day or some other excuse instead of looking at their entire training program.

So many newbies get into deep trouble because of TMTS and they have no idea how to differentiate between a little muscle aching and incipient serious injury. It's surprising how many runners are almost symptom-free before the onset of injury and before they know it, they are dealing with problems. I advise newbies to set out a reasonable running schedule based on their prior fitness level and then to set modest goals for increase. I tell them that their body probably won't give them a good indication whether they are over-training at first, so "listen to your body" isn't really going to help until they have more experience. The only way to get more experience is to keep on running and they can't do that if they are injured.

I'd rather my patients stopped running BEFORE their bodies started talking to them. I'd see them on the trails rather than in the clinic.

Great summary Jason.

Jane said:

De-lurking to say that I liked the article but as a physiotherapist I think "Listen to your body" is terrible advice for newbie runners. I cringe when I hear someone giving this advice. I've seen so many newbies insist that they were listening to their bodies and all the while they were over-reaching their training until they broke on one long run or speed interval too many. Then they take weeks off, insisting that it was the shoes or the trail or they were dehydrated that day or some other excuse instead of looking at their entire training program.

So many newbies get into deep trouble because of TMTS and they have no idea how to differentiate between a little muscle aching and incipient serious injury. It's surprising how many runners are almost symptom-free before the onset of injury and before they know it, they are dealing with problems. I advise newbies to set out a reasonable running schedule based on their prior fitness level and then to set modest goals for increase. I tell them that their body probably won't give them a good indication whether they are over-training at first, so "listen to your body" isn't really going to help until they have more experience. The only way to get more experience is to keep on running and they can't do that if they are injured.

I'd rather my patients stopped running BEFORE their bodies started talking to them. I'd see them on the trails rather than in the clinic.

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Jane it is great to have the input of a professional on this site. And also a warm welcome to our site. How would a runner know when they reached that stage? I would think that they would feel little "niggles" as Lee would say. The feeling of even a slight discomfort would be a tale of caution. I percieve this as my body "talking" to me, and it is telling me something needs to be investigated. It is a feeling of awareness that we are talking about when we say "listen to your body".

As Dutchie said, it's great to have a physiotherapist participating on this site. However, I think Jane missed some of the subtlety of Jason's argument. LTYB can work for at least some people. Likewise, a set program or method can backfire for some. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Ideally one should be aware of all things pertaining to running and constantly evaluate what's going on. In reality, most of us will start with partial information at best, and then seek more knowledge as interest evolves or as problems surface. I can give personal examples of both methods working/not working.

I ran barefoot twenty years ago, no problem, just LTYP-ing it. When I began again a year and a half ago, I read the key to barefoot running is a forefoot landing, exaggerated it, and got top-of-the-foot pain. A little knowledge can be dangerous. I would've been better served just listening to my body in this case, as I'm probably one of those who has halfway decent form without thinking about it.

Conversely, a month ago my body practically screamed at me that I was doing something wrong. I got my first case of ITBS and then top-of-the-foot pain after attempting to increase my longest distance by 50% within a few weeks' time. OK, TMTS, and as Dutchie notes, there was only the slightest of niggles foreshadowing the breakdown. My body was whispering right before it started yelling. A more gradual increase, as almost everyone recommends, would've been best to avoid this particular sort of LTYB conversational lapse. In any case, unfortunately, my body didn't tell me exactly what I was doing wrong, just that something was wrong. I reduced distance, but this didn't help. Turns out I wasn't massaging and stretching out my lower leg and foot enough, and had allowed them to get very tight. It took quite a lot of reading to figure that one out, after first eliminating weak glutes/hips (the common explanation of ITBS), stress reaction/fracture (the common explanation of TOFP), and other possibilities. It took re-reading Jimmy Hart's article (http://gobarefooting.wordpress.com/2010/04/21/injury-top-of-the-foot-pain/) and a fluke walk after which TOFP flared up on the other foot, for me to realize what the problem was. For such a common ailment, it's surprising how few BFR sites/books talk about this therapy. Point being, even when you don't listen to your body, and seek a more analytical route, the answer or solution isn't always any easier to find. My lower legs were always very tight after longer runs, but I hadn't been listening to my body enough to figure out what they were telling me (massage and stretch!), nor had I read well or comprehensively enough to know what I should do about that. Both the LTYB and analytical method had failed me to some extent, due to my own inability to use them properly.

Telling someone solely to "listen to their body" is indeed quite useless for most everyone. Should we listen to our bodies as we run of course. Running is both perceptive and physical so listening to and feeling what is happening is critical for our success. When individuals struggle to understand what is going when running they should be cautious as they explore improving their skill and/or seek someone knowledgeable to assist in the learning process.

I struggle with this Jason. I understand the premise, and at some level it makes sense….but then I run it through my own experiences and use cases and can’t see where “Listen to your body” is useful primary advice. Maybe I’m too influenced by my own injury riddled past, I don’t know.

The thing is, in some ways it’s a bit of an irony. The questions you’re suggesting we ask ourselves as we run (sort of a self diagnostics) is in some ways very much NOT about “Listen to your body”. It’s comparing what is happening to what I think SHOULD be happening, which is all very analytical. How do I know if my feet are too loud if I don’t know how loud too loud is ? How do I know if my foot is landing correctly if I don’t know how I want it to land ? How do I know if my posture is right or wrong, if I don’t know what good running posture is ?

What you’re describing is very much the thought process I go through when I’m running. I try to be aware of what my body is doing, so I can correct anything that is going awry. I suppose this is “Listen to your body”, but first I read numerous books, read articles on running, checked out forums like this one, talked to people who run successfully, etc……..in an attempt to figure out what I was doing wrong, so I knew what “right” was. So, it seems to me, before I can productively “Listen to my body” I need to know what I’m listening for, and I need to know what to do about it if I notice something that seems off. I’m not going to figure out the solution by simply “listening”. I may not even know the problem.

The other angle on this is the injury one which was mentioned quite rightly above. I know personally I have felt great many times, only to “break” on an innocuous run the very next day. Should I have known something was wrong ? Were there early warning signs ? Did I simply miss the indicators that I needed to pull back, and slow down ? Probably. But was that because I wasn’t listening properly (probable), or because I didn’t know what to listen for (certainty) ? So again, IMO, LEARNING is the prerequisite to LISTENING. Without the learning, I’m not equipped to do anything with the information my body is sending.

If I’m misinterpreting what you are saying, I apologize in advance.

Whenever I am given a choice between two views that seem compatible, I run it through the Hegelian dialectic. In this case I get:

1.) try to listen to your body (proprioception)
2.) try to understand what your body is saying (analysis)
3.) try to understand what your body should be saying (more analysis)
4.) try to understand if what your body is saying is what it should be saying (more proprioception)

repeat until the thesis (proprioception) and antithesis (analysis) have resulted in synthesis (running bliss).

Jane said:

De-lurking to say that I liked the article but as a physiotherapist I think "Listen to your body" is terrible advice for newbie runners. I cringe when I hear someone giving this advice. I've seen so many newbies insist that they were listening to their bodies and all the while they were over-reaching their training until they broke on one long run or speed interval too many. Then they take weeks off, insisting that it was the shoes or the trail or they were dehydrated that day or some other excuse instead of looking at their entire training program.

So many newbies get into deep trouble because of TMTS and they have no idea how to differentiate between a little muscle aching and incipient serious injury. It's surprising how many runners are almost symptom-free before the onset of injury and before they know it, they are dealing with problems. I advise newbies to set out a reasonable running schedule based on their prior fitness level and then to set modest goals for increase. I tell them that their body probably won't give them a good indication whether they are over-training at first, so "listen to your body" isn't really going to help until they have more experience. The only way to get more experience is to keep on running and they can't do that if they are injured.

I'd rather my patients stopped running BEFORE their bodies started talking to them. I'd see them on the trails rather than in the clinic.

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AMEN

Makes sense Lee, but isn't there an underlying assumption of knowledge embedded in all of that ? How do you understand what your body is saying with little or no education on what your body SHOULD be doing ? That's the part I guess I'm getting hung up on.

Listening to your body is really your conscious mind getting in the way of what your body is trying to tell you, which is probably stop trying to listen to your body and relax.
I like the idea of distraction, i often run listening to field recordings, there is no beat to disrupt my natural cadence but enough information to distract my attention away from running form OCD. I have a 30min recording of a thunderstorm that i love.

It's all fun and games until your body doesn't SAY anything until AFTER you have the stress fracture. Or whatever.
Y'all are presupposing that every person has the ability to survive the newbie stages to GET to the good efficient stages. Big assumption. A little hippy pie in the sky. But I forgive you and love you anyways.

Hawkbilly said:

Makes sense Lee, but isn't there an underlying assumption of knowledge embedded in all of that ? .

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Yes, I think there is Hawkbilly. Dialectics are emergent/embedded--neither side of the equation exists without the other. Even toddlers come to running with some proprioceptive experience developed in crawling and standing first, and may even have some kind of basic conscious understanding of what they are trying to achieve. All of us have varying backgrounds in sports, injuries, fitness, health issues, proprioception gained from other activities (music, dance, yardwork), scientific knowledge, and so forth, and that's why a one-size-fits-all approach won't work. This is Jason's main point I think. You have said you needed some guidance right from the start. I feel as though I haven't needed as much. But all of us have some initial proprioception to build on, as well as some basic concept of what running is about. A purist LTYB approach assumes a certain ideal background and ability that few of us have. A purist follow-a-certain-method approach assumes perfect knowledge is possible, and that everyone is starting in the same place and will progress in the same manner (of course real coaches make adjustments). But really, proprioception and methodical analysis are both 'moments' in the same process.

Bare Lee said:

Yes, I think there is Hawkbilly. Dialectics are emergent/embedded--neither side of the equation exists without the other. Even toddlers come to running with some proprioceptive experience developed in crawling and standing first, and may even have some kind of basic conscious understanding of what they are trying to achieve. All of us have varying backgrounds in sports, injuries, fitness, health issues, proprioception gained from other activities (music, dance, yardwork), scientific knowledge, and so forth, and that's why a one-size-fits-all approach won't work. This is Jason's main point I think. You have said you needed some guidance right from the start. I feel as though I haven't needed as much. But all of us have some initial proprioception to build on, as well as some basic concept of what running is about. A purist LTYB approach assumes a certain ideal background and ability that few of us have. A purist follow-a-certain-method approach assumes perfect knowledge is possible, and that everyone is starting in the same place and will progress in the same manner (of course real coaches make adjustments). But really, proprioception and methodical analysis are both 'moments' in the same process.

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This makes perfect sense to me.

Last Place Jason said:

I agree, Lee. It's one of the more frustrating points of these discussions- too many people fail to realize any one solution will only work for a portion of the population. Likewise, it's difficult to get people to understand that others have success with methods that failed them. It's difficult to get people to look beyond their own experiences.

Jane was skeptical, but as a physiotherapist she probably doesn't encounter too many people that have successfully used LTYB. Agile is skeptical because he's a coach for one of the most cerebral methods out there. Others have difficulty understanding the pure LTYB approach because it hasn't worked well for them. Hell, I'm skeptical because I sort of like pain.

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Indeed, it is difficult to get past ones own experiences. That said, it's not so much that I'm skptical a LTYB approach would work for some, I'm sure it would. However I think for many, it would not. I think the older we get, and the farther we get from our natural instincts of youth, the more we need some mechanism to guide us back to that place. We need to be shown what we've never consciously known.

Hawkbilly said:

Indeed, it is difficult to get past one's own experiences.

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This is the single biggest roadblock to understanding. We are constantly projecting ourselves out into the world.

I think that part of the problem is that many people never learned how to exercise properly. Ideally, kids should learn while in school. I didn't make full use of that opportunity, as I was overweight and disliked exercise.

I took a PE class in college, Cardio Conditioning or something, and the track coach gave us some pointers. It was a nice start, though I still ended up overdoing it a few times. Fast forward many years, and I think I have the hang of it now.

We learn a lot in school. Just like kids are supposed to learn math, spelling, history, chemistry, etc, why shouldn't they learn about physical fitness? That's something that everyone needs.