Physiotherapy for Runners in Adelaide

• Runner's knee (patellofemoral pain): pain around or behind the kneecap, worse on hills and stairs.
• Shin splints and, when ignored, stress reactions of the shin bone.
• Achilles tendinopathy: the stiff, sore Achilles first thing in the morning.
• Plantar heel pain (plantar fasciitis): the first steps out of bed.
• ITB pain on the outside of the knee, and hip and gluteal tendon pain on the outside of the hip.
• Calf and hamstring strains, the sudden ones.

Nearly all of these have the same root: load went up faster than the tissue could adapt. More kilometres, more hills, new shoes, a return after a break. Finding which one it was is most of the fix.

Your training history in detail (what changed, and when), your running on the spot and on the path outside if needed, strength and control of the hip, knee and calf, and the painful tissue itself. We are not looking for the perfect running style; nobody has it. We are looking for the one thing that overloaded the sore spot.

Hands-on treatment settles the sore tissue. A strength program fixes the weakness that let it get overloaded: calves for the Achilles and shins, hips for the knee, the lot for the hamstring. And a running plan sets how much you can keep doing now and how it builds back, in writing, week by week. Most runners keep running at a reduced level throughout. For stubborn tendon pain that has not responded to loading, we have shockwave therapy at Seaton.

Complete rest is rarely the answer. It settles the pain and fixes nothing, so the injury returns the week you start again.

• Pain that is there at the start of a run, not just afterwards.
• Pain in one specific spot on a bone that is getting worse run by run.
• Achilles or heel stiffness every morning for more than a couple of weeks.
• You have cut your distance to manage it and it is still there.
• A sudden calf or hamstring pull that stopped a run.

Runners who come in at two weeks are usually running normally at six. Runners who come in at three months are not.

If you are returning after months off, or starting running for the first time, the single most useful thing we do is set a sensible build. The ten per cent rule is a rough guide, not a law, and we tailor it to your history, your weight, your age and what hurt last time. A short assessment before a program starts is far cheaper than treating the injury four weeks in.