Orthopedics Today highlights the findings of an HSS study led by sports medicine physician Brett G. Toresdahl MD and presented at the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine Annual Meeting (AMSSM), which showed an association between increases in training volume with injuries among runners training for a marathon.

Dr. Toresdahl and colleagues monitored 732 runners participating in the 2019 New York City Marathon starting 16 weeks before the race. Participants logged training runs using an exercise training application (Strava), and researchers surveyed runners every 4 weeks about injuries and to verify all runs were logged. Researchers used the acute-to-chronic workload ratio to analyze 57,546 training runs logged during the study period.

“We did a fairly standard approach to the acute-to-chronic workload ratio where we looked at the training mileage over the past 7 days and compared it to the training mileage over the past 28 days,” explained Dr. Toresdahl. “Then, we did a rolling average of that and we counted how many days over a course of a 4-week period runners exceeded a threshold of 1.5 and then we associated the number of days over that threshold with the recurrence of injury.”

Dr. Toresdahl continued, “Overuse injuries and running injuries in general are a part of why people see sports medicine physicians and, if we can find ways to decrease those injuries using the data that they are already collecting with watches or smartphone apps, then we can hopefully keep people active and out of the office which is, at the end of the day, what we are all hoping for [and that] is that they can keep running.”

Read the full article at Healio/com/news/orthopedics.