This weekend, we presented a coach education session on behalf of England Athletics. The session was designed to help coaches understand, diagnose and help to prevent injuries in their athletes.

The session was offered by EA to endurance running coaches in the region in order to increase their knowledge of strength & conditioning.

The session was broken into four sections, roughly:

• common injuries suffered by endurance runners
• the underlying anatomy and causes of the injuries
• how to spot the potential for these injuries in your athletes.
• how to put into place strategies to prevent these injuries

Hopefully, the coaches will go away knowing a little more about the standard problems – patellafemoral pain syndrome (PFMS), IT-band friction syndrome (ITBFS), pronation related issues etc. They were also introduced to a lot of low-level rehab/pre-hab exercises and four ‘major’ weight training movements – hip dominant, quad dominant, gait and ‘pull from thigh’ (which is a first step towards explosive lifting).