Preventing marathon training injuries, and running injuries in general, is the most important component to help you create optimal training consistency.  Consistency in training is the foundation of fitness improvement.  If you become injured it can dramatically affect progress to your goals for obvious reasons.

Here are four ways to prevent running injuries:

1) Listen To Your Body

It is very important to keep tabs on how you feel, and the more experience you gain the better at this you will become.  Be aware of your emotional state, any aches or pains you have, and whether or not you are sleeping well.  If any of these things begin to appear to be consistently abnormal, then pay attention to them and take corrective action as soon as possible.  Sometimes we may not be able to see the forest for the trees in our own lives, so pay attention to what your friends and family say to you.  For example, are people consistently telling you that you look like you are tired?  If so, perhaps you need more sleep.  Get to a medical practitioner early on if you feel any strange aches and pains.  Get more sleep at night if you begin to get more aggravated at things than normal.

2) Warm Up Sufficiently

It’s very the you get your body up to operating temperature before you get into the meat of your marathon training or race.  Being warmed up allows your body to operate more efficiently and enables your ligaments and connective tissues to be more playable and flexible decreasing the risk that you will pull or tear something.  Here are some pointers on how to properly warm up for a marathon training run.

3) Wear Proper Shoes

This almost goes without saying, but if you wear the wrong shoes you will change your natural biomechanical chain, causing undue stress on areas in your body that are not trained or built for those stresses.  Get properly fit for shoes and don’t pick them due to their brand, their color, or because the brand had a cool commercial on TV.  Here is a post on how to find the best running shoe for you.

4) Do a Dynamic Stretch Routine

It’s very important to have as full range of motion in your legs and lower back as possible.  Increasing and or maintaining this range of motion helps prevent injury because it allows you to generate more power, recruit more muscles, and not place stress on your tendons and ligaments.  If your range of motion is limited, you may find yourself overcompensating by an inefficient or ineffective running gait which can lead to overuse injuries. Stretching also keeps your muscles fibers from sticking together (think “muscle knots”) at a minimum which can become the leading cause of injury in many runners.