There is nothing worse than injury, so how can we prevent triathlon injuries? If we don’t want our sense of identity and our reason for getting up in the mornings to disappear with an injury, we need to do what we can to prevent triathlon injuries.
A quick disclaimer before I get stuck in, is that nobody can ever truly promise to prevent triathlon injuries entirely. We can go a very long way to reducing them with the tips below, but any coach or physiotherapist who promises they can prevent injuries entirely is lying to you. The very best athletes training with the very best coaches and physios still get injured. I don’t think it’s possible to train for more than a few years in triathlon without picking up some kind of niggle.
This doesn’t mean we should accept devastating injuries as being inevitable, so let’s look at the best way to prevent triathlon injuries. I will be focusing on overuse injuries here, these are injuries which crop up out of seemingly nowhere, rather than an injury sustained by crashing your bike. You probably don’t need my help to work out how to prevent that from happening.
Increase training volume gently
Probably the biggest cause of injury is too much training volume too soon. This is incredibly common, especially in newer athletes. After spending their entire life avoiding any kind of physical activity, they find triathlon and fall in love.
They jump out of bed in the mornings to train, lose themselves in books, videos and articles like this one. It feels like anything is possible, and they try to fit in as much training as they can.
Then, suddenly, something goes ping. It could be a rubbing in your hip, a burning sensation in your knee, a stress fracture in your foot, it could even be a dramatic rupture of your achilles tendon in rare cases. Running through any kind of injury is a terrible idea. Getting injured will cause your meteoric rise through the world of triathlon to come to a crashing halt.
The cause? Too much training too soon. As a coach, I spend far more time holding athletes back than pushing them to their limits. Yes there is a time for putting in massive weeks of training, but we first need to lay the foundations.
Training should be increased in a gradual, controlled manner. Yes this is frustrating, but we need to look at the big picture. If you want to complete an IRONMAN, or qualify to represent your country, you need to see the big picture. Focus on long term development and consistency, over short term gratification.
Strength Training
Some dispute the value of strength training because they can’t find enough studies to support its effect on injury. I can’t a specific study done on the protection offered by oven gloves, but this doesn’t mean I pull hot metal objects from the oven with my bare hands.
The fact of the matter is that when you get injured and see a physio, they will most likely identify a weakness in your body which has caused the injury, and give you exercises to correct this imbalance. If that muscle was strong enough in the first place, you wouldn’t need to spend a considerable amount of money on physiotherapy and rehab.
I get it, you didn’t get into triathlon to spend hours grinding away in the gym, but this can be as little as 30-45 minutes a week to ensure we are protecting ourselves. The vast majority of modern triathletes include strength training in their programme, because it works.
Improve form and technique
Many triathlon injuries can be prevented by training with good form. Whether it’s your hands entering the water in line with your shoulders, legs that move like pistons or a rock steady torso, we want to avoid our body (especially our knees) from rocking around as we swim cycle and run.
To an extent, cues from a coach will help, but there is a much bigger element to this. We all believe we are running in a well composed fashion, or swimming the way we’ve seen in videos. The different is often a lack of strength. If our glutes, hips, rotator cuff and core are weak, they cannot support us.
Our quads (muscles at the front of our thigh) will get stronger from all those hours spent cycling, but without targeted work our smaller, supporting muscles will stay weak. These small, weak muscles now have the job of keeping your bulging quadriceps, we will end up increasing the risk of injury massively.
Stretching and foam rolling
I will admit, the direct evidence for these (especially foam rolling) is… mixed. However, tight muscles can’t contract properly, which places additional load on the surrounding muscles. This causes these smaller muscles to work much harder than they should, increasing the risk of injury.
Tight muscles will also pull on tendons, which casing tendinopathy, probably the leading type of injuries faced by triathletes. To reduce these triathlon injuries, we need to keep our muscles nice and loose. Foam rolling and/or stretching are good ways to go about this. Are they perfect? No. Is the evidence consisting? Yes. But I think we can all agree that after a good static stretching session we feel much looser. In many cases after a static stretch you can watch the range of motion visibly increase, and you can sometimes watch your muscle visibly relax on the foam roller.
Lower the intensity of your training
It won’t surprise you to hear that intense training puts more load on your muscles, tendons and ligaments than easy training. When we do hill repeats, threshold intervals and VO2 max sets, we are placing a massive amount of load on our muscles. When we do easy zone 2 training, we put much less load on our body.
Many new athletes spend too much time working much too hard, which sends the chances of injury skyrocketing. By keeping your intensity work to two, maybe three days a week, your chances of picking up an injury will plummet.
Race less to reduce triathlon injuries
Nothing will place more of a load on the body than a race. Racing one triathlon a month in itself is fine, but if that month also includes a couple of max effort parkruns, a Zwift race and a half marathon, then that’s putting a massive amount of strain on the body.
You don’t need to stop any supporting races, in fact I encourage athletes to mix it up and do what brings them joy. But nothing will break the body down more than a relentless race schedule.
Avoid long runs on tired legs
The most common type of injury in triathlon is a running injury. If we want to prevent triathlon injuries, this should be our biggest focus.
Long runs are incredibly hard on the body. Especially if you are inconsistent with them, or build them up too fast. They also have a habit of revealing poor form, as what looked great at 10 minutes in, doesn’t look so good when you’re two hours deep into a run.
The most common issues you will see is runners whose knees bow in with every step, or whose hips drop at the end of their stride. Stand at the side of the road during a marathon and you’ll see some very rogue running form. During race day when you’re pushing to your limit, this isn’t such an issue. It’s race day after all.
But during training this is another matter. These thousands of steps with our body rocking side to side will place huge strain on the associated tendons. If we start our long run fatigued, then we’re setting ourselves up for failure before we even begin.
A level of fatigue is to be expected, we can’t wait until we’re fresh as a daisy to do our long runs. But we can reduce any unnecessary fatigue ahead of our long run. This means not following an intense session, or gym session with a long run.
Many triathletes will fit most of their training in on the weekends, when they have time. They will do their long ride on Saturday and their long run on Sunday, as that’s the order they are completed during the race. But that means starting the run with tired muscles, which is going to rapidly increase the chances of injury.
The same is true of brick runs. If you finish a four hour ride and go straight into a two hour run, that’s probably fine in isolation. But if you do this every week because it’s “triathlon specific”, your risk of injury increases drastically.
Get a bike fit
There is a focus on running injuries in triathlon, and shoulder injuries are also relatively common, but staying pain free on the bike is equally important. A saddle height that is too low will cause knee pain, a reach that is too long will cause issues in your lower back, and the wrong handlebar setup can cause wrist issues that will affect you in day to day life.
The best way to prevent these issues is with a bike fit. This involves visiting a professional who will spend a minimum of 90 minutes (sometimes closer to 3 hours) with you and your bike. This isn’t just a salesperson at your local bike shop getting your saddle in the right position.
It’s assessing your mobility, pressure mapping your saddle and checking how your knee tracks as you pedal. Your fitter will look at extra support for your feet, try different saddles and experiment with stack height to get you as comfortable and efficient as possible.
If you are using aero bars, this becomes critical. These are so difficult to get into the right position once you look at the stack height, width, angle, shape of bars and more. While this isn’t related to injury prevention, it’s another great reason to get a fit.
Sports Massage
While the effectiveness of foam rolling could be up for debate, not many people will argue with the effectiveness of a sports masseuse getting stuck into your tight muscles to loosen them up. If you’re unlucky, they might even need to get the elbow in there to reach the tightest muscles deep inside your glutes.
While your muscles will slowly release themselves in time, the average body cannot keep up with the demands of triathlon training, so we need to give it some assistance. I recommend most people get a message once every 2-3 months to help stave off the risk of injury.
While these are not licensed medical professionals, they can often provide valuable insights into your body. They may be able to notice that one calf is notably tighter than the other, or you are very asymmetrical with your mobility levels. These will turn into injuries if not addressed.
Follow a structured training programme
This is the single best way to reduce triathlon injuries. While training randomly based on the weather and mood will get you started in the sport, if you want to increase your volume and start setting PBs, then you will need to start training in a more structured way.
Nearly every triathlete will follow some kind of training plan. It could be written by a club coach, one you found in a book, or a premium offering from a coach such as myself. By slowly increasing training volume and including strength training, we can protect ourselves against injury, as well as the associated costs.
My training plans aren’t free, but if they save you thousands on rehab and allow you to get to the start line injury free, surely that’s priceless? They also include videos for each strength exercise, and a triathlon training guide to help you keep your training on track even when things go wrong. Browse my plans now to take your training to the next level. Alternatively if you’re looking for a more hands-on approach, check out my coaching options here.
