Expert Advice: Listen to Your Body

Following a recent Saturday morning run in the Belgrade Forest, members of Adim Adim met with trainer Ahmet Ozmine, who offered tips on how to train efficiently and avoid injury.

Soft Strength. It’s all about warming up, stretching, and maintaining strength and flexibility for joints, ligaments and tendons. Don’t let yourself get stiff – keep your muscles strong and supple. This lowers your risk of injury. Ahmet Hoca also spoke about the stride – it should be smooth, not hard, rolling, not sliding – minimize the sound that your feet make, as sound increases with a harder impact of the foot on the ground.

Watch your back. The back begins to shrink after age 35 (as the ligaments between vertebrae start deteriorating). As they age, runners can start to feel pain/soreness in their backs – especially after longer distances. Ahmet Hoca recommended that runners stretch – especially while lying on the back – to counter this natural process of deterioration.

Crunches! The abdomen is important for runners. It’s a tender, weak area. The pain in the side comes from a lack of oxygen getting to those organs. It happens commonly when runners don’t warm up properly.

Listen to your body. As for warming up, Ahmet emphasized light stretching and warming up at least 12 minutes of easy running, jogging in place, jumping jacks, whatever – to get the muscles relaxed, to raise the pulse, and to get the body accustomed to taking in more oxygen. (Some experts also recommend some light stretching after the 12-minute warm-up. Remember: never stretch when your muscles are cold; this can cause injury.)

Before running at the maximum level of exertion, let your body tell you when it’s ready. That is, when you feel the body relax, when you feel the running become easy, that’s when you’re ready for the most vigorous part of the work-out.

Run hard, walk hard. Ahmet also noted that it’s important to push yourself, to get the most out of your work-out. It should make you tired. This is true for a runner or walker at any level: make sure you push your fast walk enough to keep your heart-rate elevated (within the appropriate range for your age group) and to work the muscles.