Reduce the likelihood of running injuries by improving your uni-lateral stance. Simply standing on one leg is an ability that every person, young and old, should be able to perform. While neurological issues can impact balance, strength is the key factor in standing on one foot. Runners can benefit by strengthening the core, hips and lower extremities.
Runners are prone to lower extremity injuries for obvious reasons. Many times a healthcare professional will examine a runner’s injury and determine that the gait is “off” due to abnormal foot and ankle motion. In many instances, these patients are told to buy a particular type of shoe or an insert for their current shoe. In fact, many of these runners are not well conditioned throughout their musculoskeletal system and this can lead to instability and weakness in their lower extremities. Any time patients are weak and lack stability in the core and hips, they are more prone to a lower extremity injury.
The running cycle is measured from the time one foot hits the ground until the same foot strikes the ground again. The middle part or “stance phase” is the time period that causes injuries in the lower extremities. During this phase, the runner’s contact foot absorbs the energy of the impact. If there is an imbalance in the musculoskeletal system, it will show up during the “stance phase”.
Running requires a person to continuously balance on one leg. Any imbalance in strength, flexibility and neuromuscular activity can lead to an injury in one or both legs. Being able to control the core, hips and lower extremities require strength and neuromuscular control. The development of both requires a lot of practice and exercises designed to challenge each leg individually.
If standing on one leg is difficult without using your arms for balance and/or you sway from side to side excessively, you can assume that your hip on that leg is not strong enough to control your body. If you are a runner and your hip is not strong enough to control your body weight during the “stance phase” you are more susceptible to injuring your lower extremity or another body part. The best solution to this problem is to focus a portion of your exercise routine on single leg exercises that are designed to develop strength and increase neuromuscular activity.
If you are “unstable” when you are standing on one leg, seek the advice and treatment from a Physical Therapist. They will assess your strength throughout your musculoskeletal system. Many times injuries that occur in the lower extremities, especially the knees, ankles and feet are a result of a weakness or flexibility issue in the hip(s). When there is weakness, range of motion issues or loss of neuromuscular activity the entire lower extremity can become unstable upon full weight bearing on the involved leg. When instability occurs, soft tissues and joint surfaces are placed under a tremendous amount of stress and strain which can cause an injury to that body part.
Being able to perform a single leg stance without losing your balance is difficult. Performing the proper single leg exercises will enhance the person’s ability to handle their body weight when they are standing on one leg. Runners have to be strong and stable on both legs, but if there is a weakness that leads to instability when they bear weight on a single leg they are most likely going to injure themselves at some point in their running career.
What better way to begin a week of gratitude than with our good friend G.K. Chesterton? He joins us here with a whimsical and wise essay on grumbling and gratitude, mountains and molehills, and drawing “poetic pleasure” from those “innumerable accidental limitations” that fall across our path. Gilbert Keith is recovering from a sprained foot causing him to stand, when he does, on one leg. Being Chesterton, he turns this inconvenience into “an adventure rightly considered” and draws soul-stirring implications from his temporary loss.
Here at Renovaré, GKC is someone for whom we are infinitely grateful.
Renovaré Team
A friend of mine who was visiting a poor woman in bereavement and casting about for some phrase of consolation that should not be either insolent or weak, said at last, “I think one can live through these great sorrows and even be the better. What wears one is the little worries.” “That’s quite right, mum,” answered the old woman with emphasis, “and I ought to know, seeing I’ve had ten of ‘em.” It is, perhaps, in this sense that it is most true that little worries are most wearing. In its vaguer significance the phrase, though it contains a truth, contains also some possibilities of self-deception and error. People who have both small troubles and big ones have the right to say that they find the small ones the most bitter; and it is undoubtedly true that the back which is bowed under loads incredible can feel a faint addition to those loads; a giant holding up the earth and all its animal creation might still find the grasshopper a burden. But I am afraid that the maxim that the smallest worries are the worst is sometimes used or abused by people, because they have nothing but the very smallest worries. The lady may excuse herself for reviling the crumpled rose leaf by reflecting with what extraordinary dignity she would wear the crown of thorns — if she had to. The gentleman may permit himself to curse the dinner and tell himself that he would behave much better if it were a mere matter of starvation. We need not deny that the grasshopper on man’s shoulder is a burden; but we need not pay much respect to the gentleman who is always calling out that he would rather have an elephant when he knows there are no elephants in the country. We may concede that a straw may break the camel’s back, but we like to know that it really is the last straw and not the first.
I grant that those who have serious wrongs have a real right to grumble, so long as they grumble about something else. It is a singular fact that if they are sane they almost always do grumble about something else. To talk quite reasonably about your own quite real wrongs is the quickest way to go off your head. But people with great troubles talk about little ones, and the man who complains of the crumpled rose leaf very often has his flesh full of the thorns. But if a man has commonly a very clear and happy daily life then I think we are justified in asking that he shall not make mountains out of molehills. I do not deny that molehills can sometimes be important. Small annoyances have this evil about them, that they can be more abrupt because they are more invisible; they cast no shadow before, they have no atmosphere. No one ever had a mystical premonition that he was going to tumble over a hassock. William III died by falling over a molehill; I do not suppose that with all his varied abilities he could have managed to fall over a mountain. But when all this is allowed for, I repeat that we may ask a happy man (not William III) to put up with pure inconveniences, and even make them part of his happiness. Of positive pain or positive poverty I do not here speak. I speak of those innumerable accidental limitations that are always falling across our path — bad weather, confinement to this or that house or room, failure of appointments or arrangements, waiting at railway stations, missing posts, finding unpunctuality when we want punctuality, or, what is worse, finding punctuality when we don’t. It is of the poetic pleasures to be drawn from all these that I sing — I sing with confidence because I have recently been experimenting in the poetic pleasures which arise from having to sit in one chair with a sprained foot, with the only alternative course of standing on one leg like a stork — a stork is a poetic simile; therefore I eagerly adopted it.
To appreciate anything we must always isolate it, even if the thing itself symbolise something other than isolation. If we wish to see what a house is it must be a house in some uninhabited landscape. If we wish to depict what a man really is we must depict a man alone in a desert or on a dark sea sand. So long as he is a single figure he means all that humanity means; so long as he is solitary he means human society; so long as he is solitary he means sociability and comradeship. Add another figure and the picture is less human — not more so. One is company, two is none. If you wish to symbolise human building draw one dark tower on the horizon; if you wish to symbolise light let there be no star in the sky. Indeed, all through that strangely lit season which we call our day there is but one star in the sky — a large, fierce star which we call the sun. One sun is splendid; six suns would be only vulgar. One Tower Of Giotto is sublime; a row of Towers of Giotto would be only like a row of white posts. The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. And so, in the same pensive lucidity, I find the poetry of all human anatomy in standing on a single leg. To express complete and perfect leggishness the leg must stand in sublime isolation, like the tower in the wilderness. As Ibsen so finely says, the strongest leg is that which stands most alone.
This lonely leg on which I rest has all the simplicity of some Doric column. The students of architecture tell us that the only legitimate use of a column is to support weight. This column of mine fulfils its legitimate function. It supports weight. Being of an animal and organic consistency, it may even improve by the process, and during these few days that I am thus unequally balanced, the helplessness or dislocation of the one leg may find compensation in the astonishing strength and classic beauty of the other leg. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson in Mr. George Meredith’s novel might pass by at any moment, and seeing me in the stork-like attitude would exclaim, with equal admiration and a more literal exactitude, “He has a leg.” Notice how this famous literary phrase supports my contention touching this isolation of any admirable thing. Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson, wishing to make a clear and perfect picture of human grace, said that Sir Willoughby Patterne had a leg. She delicately glossed over and concealed the clumsy and offensive fact that he had really two legs. Two legs were superfluous and irrelevant, a reflection, and a confusion. Two legs would have confused Mrs. Mountstuart Jenkinson like two Monuments in London. That having had one good leg he should have another — this would be to use vain repetitions as the Gentiles do. She would have been as much bewildered by him as if he had been a centipede.
All pessimism has a secret optimism for its object. All surrender of life, all denial of pleasure, all darkness, all austerity, all desolation has for its real aim this separation of something so that it may be poignantly and perfectly enjoyed. I feel grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong and splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very much otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and beautiful than even we know until some accident reminds us. If you wish to perceive that limitless felicity, limit yourself if only for a moment. If you wish to realise how fearfully and wonderfully God’s image is made, stand on one leg. If you want to realise the splendid vision of all visible things — wink the other eye.
From the collection Tremendous Trifles, in public domain via Project Gutenberg.
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