20 Years of Treating Marathon Runners

I thought it was time to get a blog together after wrapping up all the treatment we do, leading up the NYC marathon. The New York City marathon one of the largest road races in the world. Over the past 20 years I've treated countless patients while  getting them ready for the New York City marathon. Over the years  I put together a marathon readiness protocol. It does vary from patient to patient and is unique and caters to them as individuals. I wanted to share some of what it consists of, and get my thoughts out there, now that we’ve wrapped up the race.  One of the first things we do is look at their posture from all angles, the front back and side. We use what is commonly called a computerized analysis. So we're looking at what's going on with the skeletal structure, as well as the musculature, at rest and in motion. 

We're also using a computerized gait analysis tool looking at see how the heel strikes, how the patient's’ gait  has the toe come off in their stride, and if they need custom orthotics. This tool is called a GaitScan and allows us to gather information that we could never get visually. In all honesty it's pretty controversial with runners to use orthotics right now. Some runners don't like to put orthotics in their shoes, especially as it gets late in the season. The GaitScan orthotics are no ordinary orthotics, they are designed for each individual, and we tend to get runners in them fairly early in to the marathon season. 

One of the main  things we do is have our runners work with our physical therapist. With the physical therapist and chiropractor working together, we're really able to pinpoint which muscles are short, weak, overactive or underactive. When we put all this together, combining it with treatments like rocktape and kinesiology taping, it definitely helps get rid of some of the kinetic imbalances that patients have. 

We have a pretty fool-proof system to build upon. Getting our patients ready for the New York City marathon is no small task, and it can be the most challenging time of year for treating patients. We’re continuing to build and evolve our protocol. In the grand scheme we want to find out what's going on that's causing injury and we want to learn how to get our runners out of pain as quickly as possible. A lot of what we do also takes in to consideration the  prevention of future injury. What we have done is, we have established a system of analyzing a person from the ground up. With our integrated approach our patients are breaking personal records, pain free.