

- Know when your body is ready. You should have no pain when resting or doing normal, every day actions. The injured area should not be tender to the touch.
- Obey the ‘pain threshold’. Once pain occurs during the first workout, note the time and/or distance. Stop your workout for the day. That length of time/distance is your ‘pain threshold’. Your next workout should be just under that time/distance, and increase from that figure each week.
- Use the 10% increase rule. Once the starting distance/time is set, increase your distance ten percent each week, assuming the pain is now in check. If you experience pain before the goal distance of a workout, repeat step one above.
- Stop skimping. Now is the time to start practicing the safety measures you may have been secretly ignoring so far. Get a properly fitted pair of shoes at a specialty running store. Start warming up and cooling down religiously. Invest in foam rollers and compression wear and use them.
- Practice patience. It’s typical for recovery to take weeks and sometimes months. Professional trainers assume the recovery training will take at a minimum the same number of weeks that you were sidelined. Try not to view your recovery workouts as a penalty, but as an investment in longer and stronger workouts in the future.
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