Well-conditioned hips and glutes support strong edging and help prevent the inward knee collapse that can throw a skier off balance. Powerful quadriceps and hamstrings are crucial for maintaining a stable ski stance, absorbing shock, protecting the joints, and controlling speed. A strong core keeps skiers centred over their skis, even in unpredictable snow or challenging terrain.

Early-season conditioning isn’t just about performance—it’s a cornerstone of injury prevention. Skiing places significant strain on the knee joint and its supporting ligaments, particularly the ACL, making knee injuries some of the most common on the mountain. Many of these issues stem from inadequate muscular endurance. When the body doesn’t have the required strength, the knees end up absorbing forces they aren’t ready to handle. Strengthening the muscles that support ski-specific movements helps distribute load more effectively and reduces unnecessary stress on joints and connective tissues.

The good news? Pre-season training doesn’t have to be complicated. Even short, consistent sessions focused on the right muscle groups can deliver impressive benefits.

And one final tip: don’t abandon your strength routine once the lifts start spinning. Continuing your training throughout the season is one of the best ways to stay strong and ski better.

Essential Ski-Season Exercises

1. Squat

3 sets × 8 reps, 1-minute rest between sets

A foundational strength exercise targeting the quadriceps and glutes. These muscles take on significant load during downhill skiing—especially the quadriceps of the outside leg as you initiate and hold a turn.

• Start with feet shoulder-width apart.
• Bend your knees to lower into the squat as far as your range of motion allows, then push back up to standing.
• Make sure your knees track over your feet—if they wobble, engage your glutes to stabilise.
• Keep your pelvis in a neutral position throughout the movement.

2. Split Squat

3 sets × 8 reps, 1-minute rest between sets

This single-leg variation builds quad strength while also improving balance and hip stability. It’s excellent for training the control needed for dynamic weight shifts on the slopes.

• Start with one foot in front of the other, about hip-width apart.
• Lower your back knee toward the floor until both legs form roughly 90° angles.
• Push through your front foot to return to standing.
• If you’re wobbling, pick a spot to focus on or stay close to a wall for extra support.

3. Dead Bug

3 sets × 8 reps, 1-minute rest between sets

A highly effective core activation exercise that reinforces the stability and posture required for maintaining a strong, centred position over your skis.

• Lie on your back with your arms extended toward the ceiling and legs bent at 90°.
• Lower your opposite arm and leg until they hover just above the ground, then return to the starting position.
• Repeat on the other side.
• Keep your lower back pressed into the mat throughout the movement.

4. Side-Lying Adduction

3 sets × 8 reps, 1-minute rest between sets

This movement targets the adductors—the inner-thigh muscles heavily engaged in skiing. Strong adductors contribute to a solid ski stance and assist in stabilising the knee during edging and turning.

• Lie on your side with your hips stacked.
• Bring your top leg slightly forward with your foot on the ground.
• Lift your bottom leg toward the ceiling, keeping your pelvis and trunk stable.
• Use your hand for balance if needed.

5. Hamstring Curl

3 sets × 8 reps, 1-minute rest between sets

Designed to strengthen the hamstrings, which play a key role in knee stability. Balanced strength between the quadriceps and hamstrings is essential and can help reduce the risk of ACL-related injuries.

• Lie on your back with your feet resting on an exercise ball and legs extended.
• Press your heels into the ball and roll it toward your glutes.
• To make it more challenging, lift your hips into a bridge position.
• Keep your arms by your sides, pressing into the floor for stability.

Optional Training Variation

For an added challenge, alternate 8 reps of squats with 8 reps of split squats before taking your 1-minute rest. This continuous cycle increases quadriceps endurance. Repeat for 3 rounds.

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Holiday Gift Guide Edition

IMPACT Magazine’s 2025 Holiday Gift Guide Edition is packed with our most inspiring gift ideas yet! It’s curated for the health-minded, fitness-driven, wellness-focused and food-loving people in your life. From standout essentials to unexpected finds, everything you need to complete your list is right here. Plus, don’t miss our ‘Best of Holiday Recipes’ collection!

As Graham Scarr writes in Biotensegrity: The Structural Basis of Life, “Part of the problem with classical mechanics is that these laws… were described through experiments on inanimate objects with relatively simple and uniform internal structures. Living tissues, on the other hand, are multiscale composites where each anatomical part is a complex module made from smaller modules nested within its complicated, heterarchical organization… and their physiological interactions conform more to the relatively new physics of soft matter than standard engineering.” 

Bones bend. Fascia responds. Tissues under high strain stay supple. Even the most ‘rigid’ parts of the body—bones, tendons—store and return energy like a spring. Structures that would collapse under classical assumptions remain fluid, stable, and alive.

The Cracks in Classical Biomechanics

The mechanical view of the human body found fertile ground during the Industrial Revolution. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli often called the “father of biomechanics,” played a pivotal role in this. His seminal work, De Motu Animalium (“On the Movement of Animals”), laid the groundwork for viewing bones as levers, joints as hinges, muscles as motors. It made sense, especially in a world reshaped by industry. Bodies were measured, mapped, and modeled like machines. Movement was simplified into vectors and torque. Rehab focused on correcting angles and restoring symmetry. Coaching drills emphasized alignment and force production.

But living tissue doesn’t follow engineering rules. Muscles don’t contract in isolation. Fascia doesn’t behave like rope. And forces aren’t neatly transferred along a single axis—they ripple, radiate, and reorganize across the system. Most importantly, real-world human movement is messy, variable, adaptive. It’s not rigid—it’s responsive.

This gap between the predictable world of physics and the emergent nature of living systems is where biomechanics starts to fall apart. Classical mechanics isn’t inherently wrong—it’s just profoundly incomplete for understanding life.

Euclid and Geometry 

The problem isn’t just with the mechanics—it’s with the geometry.

Euclidean geometry, first codified by the Greek mathematician Euclid around 300 BCE, offered a logical and consistent way to understand space. His system of points, lines, and angles was so intuitively “correct” that it shaped the way humans conceptualized reality for over two thousand years. Classical mechanics grew within this spatial system—flat, rigid, predictable—and it was only natural that early biomechanics would adopt it as well.

The use of Euclidean logic in biomechanics may help draw diagrams or model force vectors, but it cannot explain how life holds itself together. It cannot model the self-organizing, shape-shifting, heterarchical nature of living movement. For that, we need a different geometry. One that curves. One that responds. One that lives.

Biotensegrity: A New Structural Language

This brings us to biotensegrity, a revolutionary model for understanding biological architecture. The term “tensegrity” was coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, an architect and inventor, to describe structures that maintain their integrity through a continuous tensional network, rather than continuous compression. Think of a tensegrity sculpture: rigid struts (compression) float within a web of continuous cables (tension), holding the shape without touching each other.

Dr. Stephen Levin, an orthopedic surgeon, was instrumental in applying Fuller’s tensegrity principles to biological systems, recognizing that this non-intuitive geometry perfectly describes the human body. 

In biotensegrity, bones are the discontinuous compressive elements, ‘floating’ within a continuous, pre-stressed tensional network formed by fascia, muscles, ligaments, and even fluid dynamics. Force is not transmitted through stacked levers but distributed dynamically throughout the entire tensional system. This means that a force applied anywhere in the body is immediately and widely disseminated, allowing for remarkable resilience, adaptability, and energy storage, much like a spring. The body doesn’t stack in segments; it floats in tension.

Heterarchy: Coordination Without Command

A key concept intertwined with biotensegrity is heterarchy. Traditional biological and mechanical models often assume a hierarchy: a top-down control system where the brain dictates every movement, or where one system is inherently more important than another. 

In a heterarchical system, there is no single “boss.” Instead, all components—from the molecular level within cells, to the cellular, tissue, organ, and musculoskeletal systems—are equally interactive and influential. They co-regulate through complex feedback loops, adapting and influencing each other in a multidirectional, omnidirectional manner. It’s not top-down, nor is it purely bottom-up; it’s a constant, dynamic interplay from the middle to the outside, from the outside to the middle, from the top to the bottom, and from the bottom to the top. This distributed control and mutual influence allow for incredible adaptability and emergent behaviour in human movement.

What This Means for Movement

The shift from a biomechanical to a biotensegrity and heterarchical understanding of the body has profound implications for how we approach movement, training, and rehabilitation:

• Coaching: We no longer focus on rigidly “aligning bones” or instructing isolated muscle contractions. Instead, the emphasis shifts to managing tension relationships throughout the entire system, cueing for adaptability, responsiveness, and global force distribution. Critically, this also involves designing movement as behaviour aimed at solving problems and tasks. Coaches can leverage task-led constraints to guide the development of motor learning and foster real-world capability, recognizing that movement solutions emerge from the body’s dynamic interaction with its environment.
• Rehabilitation: Injuries are less about a single “failure” at a joint or muscle and more about a multifaceted breakdown in the body’s ability to adapt. This can manifest as a disruption within the tensegrity matrix, a lack of sufficient movement solutions (variability) to effectively solve a movement problem, or even be influenced by lifestyle factors such as cognitive distraction, fatigue, or insufficient readiness for a given task. Treatment, therefore, moves beyond localized fixes to addressing patterns of strain and tension across the whole interconnected system, enhancing motor learning and adaptability, and considering the broader context of an individual’s readiness, fostering systemic resilience.
• Performance: Fluidity, efficiency, and resilience in athletic performance are better understood as the result of distributed coordination and continuous tension modulation, rather than brute-force production by isolated levers. Optimal movement is emergent, not simply instructed, and is always contextual to the task at hand.

The shift from the rigid, linear world of classical biomechanics to the fluid, interconnected realm of biotensegrity is not merely an academic exercise. It is a fundamental re-evaluation of how we perceive, touch, train, and heal the body. You’re not a machine in need of calibration. You’re a constellation of living tensions, adapting in real time to the forces of the world.

This article has been edited for length and reprinted with permission from www.movnat.com

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Fall Fitness Issue

IMPACT Magazine’s Fall Fitness Issue 2025 featuring the The Fitness Guy, Pete Estabrooks, telling all with his shockingly candid new memoir revealing a story you never expected, as well as former pro soccer player Simon Keith and Paralympian Erica Scarff. Find your ultimate guide to cross-training for runners, no jump cardio and superset workouts along with the best trail running shoes in our 2025 Trail Running Shoe Review, and so much more!

One of the most powerful things about working with fascia is realizing how truly interconnected the body is. There are twelve fascial lines—or anatomical “trains”—that run through the body like highways of tension and support. These lines connect everything from your toes to your skull, wrapping around muscles, bones, organs, and joints in a continuous web.

This is why a restriction in your calf or hip might show up as tightness in your shoulders or neck, or why opening the fascia around your ribs could improve your breathing and posture. When one area is restricted, it can pull on the entire line—limiting movement and creating imbalance throughout the system.

FST works with these full-body fascial lines rather than isolating single muscles. By doing so, it not only treats the area of discomfort but also addresses the root cause, allowing for more complete and long-lasting results.

What is FST?

In an FST session, a trained practitioner gently moves your body through pain-free ranges of motion while you stay relaxed on a treatment table. Instead of forcing a stretch, they use a blend of traction, oscillation, and breathwork to ease tension and “open up” your joints and release deep fascial tension without forcing your body into discomfort. Unlike static stretching, which often targets specific muscles, FST focuses on the entire fascial system, freeing up restrictions and increasing flexibility from head to toe. 

Clients often describe their first session as surprising: less like stretching and more like their body is finally able to exhale after years of holding on. Some feel immediate relief from nagging aches. Others experience a dramatic increase in joint mobility or an overall sense of lightness and ease.

Why Fascia Matters 

Fascia plays a key role in everything we do. From movement efficiency and posture to injury prevention and pain reduction. When the fascia is healthy and hydrated, it glides smoothly with movement, but stress, repetitive motions, trauma or poor posture can cause it to stiffen and feel restricted. This limits your range of motion and creates imbalances throughout the body.

Unlike muscles, fascia doesn’t respond well to aggressive stretching or isolated effort. It requires gentle, whole-body approaches that involve the nervous system—and that’s exactly what FST provides.

Who is FST for?

FST is for anyone who wants to move with more freedom and less discomfort. Athletes use it to recover faster and perform at their peak, while desk workers find relief from the stiffness that comes with long hours of sitting hunched over their keyboards. Everyday people with long-time injuries or chronic tightness often discover a level of relief and mobility they didn’t think was possible. 

How Is FST Different from Other Therapies?

The difference lies in how fascia responds. FST doesn’t just knead or lengthen muscles—it creates space in the joints and invites the nervous system to release tension safely. It’s passive, meaning you’re not doing the work—your practitioner is guiding your body into a state where healing and release can actually happen.

Massage feels good, yoga can improve flexibility, and foam rolling has its place—but none of them access the deeper fascial layers in the way FST can. It’s the missing link in recovery that many people didn’t even know they were missing.

The Breath-Body Connection

Breath is an essential component of FST. During sessions, clients are guided to breathe in sync with the stretches, which helps calm the nervous system and create deeper, more sustainable release. Breath also connects the brain and body, encouraging presence, awareness, and restoration on a level that’s both physical and emotional.

Whether you’re chasing a performance goal, healing from injury, or simply wanting to feel more at ease in your own skin, FST meets you where you are. It’s not about pushing through pain or “earning” your recovery. It’s about giving your body the support it needs to move the way it was designed to.

When you give your fascia the attention it deserves, everything changes: posture improves, movement becomes easier, and chronic tension starts to melt away. It’s not magic, it’s just a smarter way to work with your body instead of against it.

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Fall Fitness Issue

IMPACT Magazine’s Fall Fitness Issue 2025 featuring the The Fitness Guy, Pete Estabrooks, telling all with his shockingly candid new memoir revealing a story you never expected, as well as former pro soccer player Simon Keith and Paralympian Erica Scarff. Find your ultimate guide to cross-training for runners, no jump cardio and superset workouts along with the best trail running shoes in our 2025 Trail Running Shoe Review, and so much more!

Why Knee Mobility Matters

Your knees play a crucial role in just about every movement you make—from walking and running to squatting and standing up from a chair. As hinge joints, they allow your legs to bend and straighten, and they’re deeply influenced by what’s happening both above (at the hips) and below (at the ankles). That means if your knees aren’t moving well, it’s not just your lower body that suffers—your entire movement system is affected.

When knee mobility is restricted, your posture, balance, and stability can all take a hit. Tight quads, stiff hips, and limited ankle range of motion can cause your knees to compensate in ways they weren’t designed to—leading to discomfort, poor mechanics, and eventually injury. In fact, many common issues like runner’s knee and pain during squats can be traced back to poor movement quality, not just weak muscles.

Some of the most common causes of limited knee mobility include:

• A sedentary lifestyle (aka too much sitting, not enough movement)
• Past injuries that were never fully rehabilitated
• Muscle tightness in the quads, hamstrings, calves, or hip flexors
• Inflammation or joint irritation from repetitive overuse

The good news? You can improve how your knees move and feel—often with just a few minutes a day. Consistent mobility exercises for knees help reduce stiffness, reintroduce natural range of motion, and build more durable, pain-free movement patterns.

Whether you’re dealing with discomfort or simply want to stay ahead of future problems, exercises to improve knee mobility are a smart investment in long-term performance and joint health.

Simple Exercises to Improve Knee Mobility

Mobility is a major player in keeping your knees healthy, functional, and pain-free. Whether you’re bouncing back from an injury or just trying to move better every day, a few targeted mobility drills can go a long way.

Below are some of the best knee mobility exercises to improve flexibility and control—so you can walk, squat, run, and move with confidence.

Best Knee Mobility Exercises to Enhance Flexibility and Movement

These exercises help improve your knees’ ability to bend, extend, and move freely through their natural range—crucial for everyday comfort and injury prevention.

1. Heel Slides

Lie on your back with legs extended. Slowly slide one heel toward your glutes, bending the knee, then extend back out. Repeat 10–15 times per leg.

Why it works: Encourages gentle knee flexion and extension—especially useful after long bouts of sitting or in early rehab.

2. Seated Knee Extensions

Sit tall in a chair. Extend one leg straight out, squeezing your quad at the top, then lower slowly. Perform 10–15 reps per leg.

Why it works: Strengthens the quadriceps, which play a key role in stabilizing the knee joint during movement.

3. Quadriceps and Hamstring Stretch

For quads: stand and pull one foot behind you.

For hamstrings: place your foot on a low surface and hinge forward at the hips.

Why it works: Releases tension in major muscle groups that often restrict knee motion and cause pain or discomfort during activity.

Exercises for Knee Mobility That Promote Better Control and Stability

These drills support joint stability, balance, and proprioception—all essential for athletic performance and daily movement.

1. Knee Circles

With feet together and knees slightly bent, slowly circle your knees clockwise, then counterclockwise. Perform 10 reps in each direction.

Why it works: Lubricates the joint and enhances spatial awareness of knee positioning during movement.

2. Step-Through Lunges

From standing, step forward into a lunge, then swing the leg back into a reverse lunge—all in one smooth motion. Alternate legs for 8–10 reps.

Why it works: Builds strength and coordination through a full range of motion while reinforcing single-leg stability.

3. Wall-Assisted Deep Knee Bends

Stand with your back against a wall and feet slightly forward. Slide down into a deep squat and hold for 15–30 seconds. Repeat 2–3 times.

Why it works: Helps restore confidence and control in deep knee positions without overloading the joint.

When it comes to knee health, mobility equals longevity. Practicing these exercises for knee mobility just a few times per week can help you maintain functional movement, reduce stiffness, and feel stronger doing the things you love.

This article has been reprinted with permission from www.thesteadystate.com

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Fall Fitness Issue

IMPACT Magazine’s Fall Fitness Issue 2025 featuring the The Fitness Guy, Pete Estabrooks, telling all with his shockingly candid new memoir revealing a story you never expected, as well as former pro soccer player Simon Keith and Paralympian Erica Scarff. Find your ultimate guide to cross-training for runners, no jump cardio and superset workouts along with the best trail running shoes in our 2025 Trail Running Shoe Review, and so much more!

She trained smart. She stretched religiously. She ran through the pain—until she couldn’t. The same hip would seize up again and again, derailing months of preparation. Her physio blamed her glutes. Her coach blamed her cadence. Nobody asked if her pelvis might be rotated.
This scenario plays out every day—not just in recreational runners, but in elite athletes. And yet few people—runners or rehab professionals—are familiar with the concept that could finally explain it.

Malalignment Syndrome

The term was coined by the late Dr. Wolfgang Schamberger, a physician, author, and lifelong runner who spent the better part of his career challenging the orthopedic and rehab community to rethink what injury really is—and where it begins.

What Is Malalignment Syndrome?

Dr. Schamberger discovered the hard way—through personal injury—that some problems don’t stem from weakness, tightness, or overuse. They come from how the body is built and aligned.

Subtle structural asymmetries in the pelvis, spine, and limbs can shift the way force travels through the body. The result? Chronic, one-sided injuries that seem to defy logic.
His books, The Malalignment Syndrome and Read My Hips!, laid out a rigorous framework for understanding how mechanical imbalances can quietly derail even the most robust athletes.

Studies suggest that over 80 per cent of chronic running injuries occur on one side of the body, strongly implicating hidden mechanical imbalances rather than global dysfunction.
And runners are particularly vulnerable—not because running is inherently dangerous, but because it is relentlessly repetitive. If your structure is even slightly off, you’re repeating that “offness” thousands of times per week.

What You Need to Know

1. Malalignment is often invisible to the untrained eye.
   You won’t spot it on an MRI. You won’t foam-roll it away. These patterns involve joint orientation, limb length asymmetry, and compensation strategies that only become visible through specific alignment-focused assessments.
2. Strength training won’t fix what alignment throws off.
   Yes, strength matters. But if your foundation is skewed, you’re just reinforcing dysfunction. A misaligned runner becomes a strong—but unstable—runner. And when your body finally hits its compensation limit, the resulting injury tends to be worse—because now you’re generating more force through a flawed foundation.
   It’s like putting a bigger engine in a car with a wheel alignment problem. The more force you generate, the bigger the eventual disaster.
3. You can’t stretch your way out of a rotated pelvis.
   Tightness is often a symptom, not a cause. Stretching might bring temporary relief, but those same tissues will tighten back up if your body’s alignment is still off. Position doesn’t just matter more than flexibility—it helps define the parameters of your mobility. If your structure is off, your range of motion will always be fighting against built-in restrictions.
4. Pain isn’t always where the problem is.
   That sore knee might be compensating for a rotated femur. That angry Achilles could be working overtime to make up for a misfiring hip. In a misaligned system, pain shows up at the weakest link—not necessarily at the root cause.
5. Alignment is measurable—and correctable.
   Professionals trained in alignment-based assessment can detect these patterns using posture grids, pelvic balance tests, gait evaluation, and manual palpation. What you uncover may surprise you—and it may change the way you train forever.

So, What Can You Do?

You don’t need to become a biomechanical detective. You just need to stop guessing—and start testing. A good clinician can guide you. But you can also begin on your own.

Runner’s Alignment Self-Check
Try these three at-home cues:

• Stand barefoot in front of a mirror. Do your kneecaps and feet point straight ahead—equally on both sides? They should. Even slight asymmetries may suggest underlying alignment issues worth exploring.
• Lie on your back and bend your knees. Do they appear even, or does one sit higher than the other?
• Perform a slow bodyweight squat. Do you favor one leg, even subtly?

If so, your body may be compensating for an underlying alignment issue.

The good news: you’re not powerless.

Dr. Schamberger believed deeply in manual therapy—especially osteopathic techniques like Muscle Energy Technique—to correct alignment. These are effective, but often require ongoing visits to a practitioner.

Fortunately, many alignment issues can be addressed through targeted corrective exercise at home. While complex cases may need professional support, most runners can begin restoring balance—without a lifetime of clinic visits.

If you’re stuck foam rolling the same tight spot or stretching a muscle that won’t release, it may be time to look upstream.

The current trend in rehab is to retrain movement—but if the foundation is off, that’s a dead end. You can’t cue your way out of structural imbalance. It’s like teaching a driver to steer better in a car with a bent wheel. The harder they try, the worse the wear.

While some pain-science experts question the importance of alignment, physics remains unchanged—and structure still governs function.
Maybe that’s the quiet revolution rehab needs. Not another trend. Not another cue. A return to fundamentals.

When the body is aligned, movement flows and pain fades. Ignore alignment, and you’re not fixing dysfunction—you’re just reshuffling it.
Pain speaks the language of imbalance. Malalignment is the message. You weren’t built to break. You were built to move.

Start moving that way again. 

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Summer Outdoor Travel Issue
IMPACT Magazine Summer Outdoor Travel Issue 2025 featuring Shanda Hill, a Canadian Ultra Triathlete who is redefining the sport. Run on some epic trails in our own backyard or join a run club. Eat your way for Mental Clarity, fueling while travelling, seasonal eating and some kitchen must haves. Become strong and fit in only 20 minutes a day, and enjoy some tasty drinks guilt free and so much more.

When you wear shoes that don’t fully connect to your foot, your toes and feet have to work differently to hold the shoe on when you’re walking. For runners and athletes, this change in foot mechanics can have ripple effects throughout the body.

It’s easy to assume that flip-flops are the very epitome of minimal footwear. After all, what could be more minimal than a rubber thong attached to a foot-shaped rubber pad? Like the best barefoot shoes, they’re flat, wide, and flexible. They’re also “open”—an important component of the “natural” argument, as they allow for greater sensory input in the form of air pressure and temperature.

It’s true, flip-flops are so close! But they fall short of being minimal-for-the-purpose-of-natural-gait in a vital way—they don’t connect to our feet. For athletes who depend on efficient, repeatable gait patterns, that missing connection can compromise performance and increase the risk of small, compounding injuries. We have to work our muscles unnaturally to keep them on. (Unfortunately, this toe-gripping action is necessary for slides, mules, and many slippers, too.)

I know, I know… gripping doesn’t sound or even feel like such a big deal, but gripping while you’re walking is more than just toes bending in different places. Those bends end up translating into mechanical input at the level of the nerves and skin and, over time, can create many problems not filed under “musculoskeletal.”

The grip to keep footwear on curls some toe bones up and some down, drives the end of some bones into the ground creating higher-than-normal pressure (hello fracture-potentially-in-the-making!) and drives the ends of some bones up into the top of the shoe (file under: corn, calluses). I won’t even mention the tension down the front of the leg—you’ll find it yourself during this top-of-the-foot-stretching exercise that helps undo the chronic tension in both the toes and in the front of the ankle.

TOP OF THE FOOT STRETCH
If you’re a chronic flip-flop wearer, then this super portable stretch is especially pertinent to your feet and targets not only intrinsic foot muscles but extrinsic ones as well. Do it a few times every day until your feet regain their intended dexterity and/or until you’ve eliminated any cramping.

• Stand on your right foot and reach your left foot back behind you, tucking the toes of your
• left foot under and placing them on the floor.
• If you find yourself leaning forward, shorten the distance you’ve reached the leg back.
• Bring your pelvis over your standing ankle and upper body over the hips.
• Work up to holding this stretch for a minute, but stop for cramping.

After a while, the toe-gripping motor pattern leads to shortened toe muscles (and a loss of parts that allow movement), which can then affect things like balance and foot arch strength, and lead to toe contractures, a.k.a hammertoes. And flip-flop research also shows that working to keep the shoe on changes many things about your gait, which means they end up affecting more than the feet.

Now I like spring and summer shoes as much as the next person, but I also like my feet to feel great and to be able to walk—or run—long distances without pain. For runners and other athletes, maintaining natural gait patterns and strong foot mechanics is especially important, and flip-flops can quietly undo a lot of that work by encouraging dysfunctional movement patterns. So, I’ve swapped out all my slide-on sandals for ones that have a strap around the back.

To keep your natural stride (and shoe) on while still enjoying the feel of the sea breeze and sunshine on your skin, swap out those slide-on sandals for something that looks more like a Greek sandal—you know, all strappy and minimal but still fully connected to your foot. If you look around, you can find uppers that are very minimal as far as mass goes, but engineered in a way that keeps the shoe on without you needing to tighten your toes. 

Adapted and edited for length from Katy Bowman’s book Whole Body Barefoot (Uphill Books, 2015).

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Summer Outdoor Travel Issue
IMPACT Magazine Summer Outdoor Travel Issue 2025 featuring Shanda Hill, a Canadian Ultra Triathlete who is redefining the sport. Run on some epic trails in our own backyard or join a run club. Eat your way for Mental Clarity, fueling while travelling, seasonal eating and some kitchen must haves. Become strong and fit in only 20 minutes a day, and enjoy some tasty drinks guilt free and so much more.

The ITB is a thick piece of connective tissue running from your hip down the outside of the leg to the knee. ITB pain is one of the most prevalent overuse knee injuries in runners.

Myths of ITB pain:

1. You must do painful rolling to treat it.
2. Stretching is the best treatment.
3. You must stop running to get rid of it.
4. It’s caused by friction at the knee.

Why do runners get ITB pain?
Pain was once believed to result from friction, but since the ITB is firmly anchored to the outer knee bone, it is now thought to be caused by compression on the bony prominence (the lateral femoral epicondyle) and possibly by impingement of sensitive fat tissue.

Overuse injuries are usually a combination of factors, especially for runners:

• Training load – did you do too much too soon?
• Fuelling – are you eating and drinking enough for the amount of running you’re doing?
• Recovery – are you giving yourself enough rest, recovery, and cross-training for your body to keep pounding the pavement day after day?
• Preparation – was your body prepared to handle the load and demand you’re putting it through on your runs?
  
  Recovery times can vary. Most people can recover within six to twelve weeks, but there will be some people who recover sooner and some who take longer.

What can you do to relieve your ITB pain?
Load management
Finding the sweet spot—relative rest. This means finding a level of running that doesn’t aggravate your symptoms.

• Reduce your running volume and duration.
• Try to reduce or limit back-to-back running days.
• Use cross-training and physio exercises on non-run days while symptoms reduce to minimize strength losses.
• Split your runs into run/walk intervals. The run portion should not push into pain, however. Discomfort can hover around 2/10 but should not spike.

Lower-limb training and preparation
Although research doesn’t specifically say strengthening will cure your ITB pain, it can be useful to prepare your body for the demands of running, and during the days off from running while symptoms reduce.

Try using hip abductor (side glute) strengthening exercises combined with other treatment strategies. Include glute med
and leg strengthening exercises three to four times a week such as:

• Side planks with hip abduction
• Hip thrusts
• Single leg Romanian deadlifts
• Single leg squats with support

Include plyometric exercises when running volume is reduced to keep the tendons and ankle complex springy. Try skipping for two minutes for a warm-up or pogo jumps for 2 x 30 seconds.

Stretching can temporarily help with symptoms but should be combined with other treatment strategies. Since the ITB is attached
to the upper hip muscles, that’s usually where the stretch is felt most.

Treatment
Pain relief is a big factor with ITB pain and manual therapy can help in the short term. To address acute symptoms, you can choose any manual therapy method that works for you. Excruciating foam rolling isn’t necessary if it doesn’t help. Massage, physiotherapy, or rolling are all options if they provide relief. Seeing a physiotherapist can help you determine the best exercises and volume for your ITB pain. When combined with training modifications and exercise, these treatments often yield the best results.

A myth about the ITB you may have heard is that you are trying to loosen it up by rolling and stretching. A stiff ITB is actually better for elastic energy storage needed for running, and that stiffness might actually help reduce your pain.

Running retraining
Changing running techniques and biomechanics may not help your pain. The key thing to remember about running technique is that you’re never taking away the impact, you’re just changing where the impact is going.

As a temporary way to reduce symptoms, you can try adopting a higher cadence while running. This encourages more of a forefoot strike which places more load on the ankle and calf, and less load on the knee where the symptoms are. Then you can gradually return to your regular running style.

Fuelling and recovery
Low energy availability (LEA) is a common condition runners may face which can have an impact on how the body reacts to the demand of running. It is important to discuss this with your family doctor and dietician.

Can you prevent ITB pain from happening in the first place?
Most injuries aren’t completely preventable, but you can use the same strategies to try to prepare your body for your runs. If your goal is longevity in your running, then it might be best to implement some of the strategies above and listen to some of the little aches and pains rather than always pushing through. One or two weeks of less running is much easier to handle than months of managing an injury. 

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Running Issue
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This is where collaborative testing and assessment come in.
By combining exercise physiology testing with orthopaedic and manual therapy evaluations, a comprehensive picture of a runner’s biomechanics can be built. Together, this data can assist in keeping runners healthy, strong, and performing at their best.

Why Testing and Assessment Matter
Running may seem simple—just put one foot in front of the other—but it’s a complex interplay of strength, stability, and biomechanics. Small imbalances can lead to inefficiencies that compound over time, eventually resulting in pain or injury. Testing provides objective data that goes beyond subjective pain descriptions or visual assessments. “If you’re not testing, you’re guessing” as the saying goes.
Key benefits of proactive assessment include:

• Identifying asymmetries and deficits before they result in decreased performance or injury.
• Providing clear benchmarks to track progress individually while comparing to normal values.
• Guiding tailored strength, mobility, and rehabilitation while maintaining a scheduled running program.
• Integrating manual therapy insights to help optimize the musculoskeletal system (muscles, joints and nervous system).

The Collaborative Approach
Step 1: Orthopaedic and Manual Therapy Assessment led by manual therapists. This starts with a hands-on orthopaedic evaluation:

• Detailed injury and performance history – understanding a runner’s past injuries and training habits provides context.
• Special orthopaedic tests – sensitive evaluations identify specific joint or soft tissue dysfunction.
• Joint mobility assessment – reveals stiffness or hypermobility that could affect stride efficiency.
• Soft tissue palpation – detects muscle tension, adhesions, or restrictions impacting movement quality.
• Neuro-muscular screening – evaluates nerve tension, motor control (coordination), and proprioception (balance).
• Provision of a plan – providing a proposed plan of management integrating different forms of manual therapy (massage therapy, chiropractic care and physiotherapy).
  
  Step 2: Exercise Physiology Testing led by exercise professionals. With the manual therapy notes in hand, the goal is now to quantify a runner’s strength, power, and movement efficiency:
• Power and jump testing (force plates) – measures ground reaction forces, landing asymmetries, and energy output. This helps us understand how a runner generates and absorbs force.
• Maximal isometric strength – evaluates key muscle groups critical for running efficiency and injury resilience like the calves, hip flexors, glutes, hamstrings and groin.
• Movement patterns – assesses running mechanics, single-leg stability and running-specific biomechanics to pinpoint deficiencies.

Putting It All Together
Data without context is just numbers. Hands-on therapy without objective measures can miss critical details. Once testing
is complete, a customized plan can be developed:

1. Data-Driven Decision Making
   Analyze test results to prioritize interventions. For example, a runner might need more single-leg stability work or require more hamstring strength, based on normative data. Findings may include muscle imbalances contributing to that achy left hip or hitch in the stride.
2. Targeted Treatment and Strength Programming
   Merge insights from both assessments. A runner with limited ankle mobility, for instance, may receive joint mobilizations alongside specific calf strengthening to maximize force absorption while increasing tissue capacity.
3. Ongoing Communication
   Collaborate closely with the runner, their coach, and other healthcare providers. Adjustments can be made as needed based on feedback and follow-up testing.
4. Reassessment and Progression
   Testing isn’t a one-time event. Periodically reassess to ensure progress is being made and refine the plan accordingly.

Case in Point
Consider a runner training for a marathon who begins to experience left hip discomfort during long runs. Traditional rest-and-ice advice might provide temporary relief, but the root cause remains unresolved. Through our collaborative assessment, one might discover that their ability to decelerate (eccentric force) as their foot hits the ground is limited on the left side. Manual testing could reveal restricted quad mobility on that side. Armed with this information, program design may focus on eccentric strength of the quads, manual release of the quads and hip flexors with massage and dry needling.

The goal can remain simple: keep runners training, not sidelined by recurring pain. Testing and assessment serve as the foundation, allowing us to treat the individual, not just the injury. Runners deserve more than generic advice or quick fixes. They need a full-spectrum approach that integrates performance data, manual therapy, and ongoing support.

So, before you push through that nagging pain or reach for another round of ice and ibuprofen, consider this: investing in a proactive assessment could be the key to unlocking your best performance yet.

Because smart runners don’t just run—they test, assess, and progress. 

Photography: Andrea Cruz

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Running Issue
IMPACT Magazine Running Issue 2025 featuring some incredible Canadian women ultrarunners who are on the rise on the world trail stage. Run your way around the world to earn your six star Abbott World Marathon Majors commemorative medal. Train for 10 km right up to a marathon – plus a 50 km trail run and 70.3 program. Strength workouts for runners, carb load with these pasta recipes and so much more.

Anyone who has had a long day at the desk knows it can end with neck pain, back problems and headaches. Research links long periods of sitting to health concerns including obesity, increased blood pressure and excess body fat around the mid-section. According to the Mayo Clinic, an analysis of 13 studies found being bottom-down for more than eight hours a day with no physical activity translates into a risk of dying like those posed by obesity and smoking.

And any damage done by the sit-down workday isn’t undone by exercise. It’s like smoking a cigarette and eating a salad. It’s not going to undo the effects.

Now that so many of us work from home, we need better strategies to improve the impact our workday has on our health. Using simple strategies to add more movement into our work time is possibly the most impactful way to improve your health. Increasing movement can improve our mood and energy levels, and can even help lengthen our lifespan. 

We spend about half of our waking hours working. Our bodies start feeling the strain of any one position after 40 minutes and ligaments start loosening after half that time. The posture we hold while we work shapes our bodies and the way we move. Sitting for long periods can shift alignment in the neck, shoulders and hips.

The longer you sit, the more your body feels it. In terms of metabolic function, as minutes shift to hours of uninterrupted sitting, your body starts getting signals it doesn’t need to process energy as much. It starts to condition itself to save energy for later, basically slowing metabolism.

Is your posture getting worse because of the way you sit?  Probably.  Is this affecting the way you run or lift or compete or taking on any sport? Almost certainly. The answer, however, is not to sit all day with better posture but, rather, to move more. The good news is that improving posture might be easier than you think. 

Building more movement into your day is more effective than the never-ending struggle of trying not to slouch. Making these few changes can not only cure your slouching habit but keep you injury-free and help athletic performance.

Mix it up

Create three positions to work in – sitting, standing and lounging with your feet up on the couch, for example. Change positions every hour if you can. That way, you cut the strain of any work posture down to 33 per cent of its original impact.

Work it in

• Combine activities with work tasks. Go for a walk when you are on a call, stand up for a video conference and relax on the sofa to write emails. 
• Fidget away. Fidgeting is the body’s way of telling you it wants to move.
• Stay hydrated. It leads to more bathroom breaks and more movement.
• Build in micro-rehab. Use a lacrosse ball to roll out a tight upper back when you are on phone calls. Raise your monitor and stretch your hips.
• Set goals. You can fit 10,000 steps into a workday without breaking a sweat.
• Use a wobble board and an active sitting cushion to engage your core.
• Get a walking pad or a cycle device to use while working.

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Health Risks to Consider Before Training for a Marathon
Before signing up for a race, talk to your primary care provider (PCP). They can evaluate any health concerns you may need to address, help you control many conditions, and connect you with providers who specialize in those conditions.

Some common conditions that affect runners are:

• Untreated eating disorders: Running with an untreated eating disorder can increase the risk of an irregular heart rhythm, or cardiac arrhythmias. Meeting with a dietitian or a mental health care provider can ensure runners receive the nutrients they need to exercise safely.
• Existing bone or muscle injuries: A sports medicine doctor can evaluate whether a bone or muscle has fully healed. A return to running too quickly can lead to re-injury. Too much force on a sprained ankle, for example, may lead to a complete bone break.
• Underlying heart conditions: Your PCP may refer you to a sports cardiologist if you have untreated high blood pressure, a family history of heart disease, or an unexplained early death of a first-degree family relative. Sports cardiologists can teach runners how to manage a heart condition throughout the race.
• Asthma: Exercise may induce asthma, a chronic condition that restricts the airway. Using a prescribed inhaler before running can help relieve some symptoms.

How Marathon Running Can Affect Key Organs

• The brain: Running can improve your mental health. The brain releases chemicals that trigger a “runner’s high,” which may help you think more clearly. However, fatigue can disrupt a runner’s focus over the course of a marathon and erode their motivation to finish. Sweating and dehydration can lower the amount of sodium in the blood, too. Sodium is an electrolyte—an electrically-charged mineral dissolved in water—that promotes nerve function. The brain is sensitive to low sodium levels. Drinking too much water or overhydrating during a marathon can result in low serum sodium, referred to as hyponatremia. Low enough levels of sodium may trigger feelings of sluggishness or confusion from the brain. This can result in death if not detected and treated.
• The kidneys: In addition to sodium, the body relies on several other electrolytes for vital functions. The heart, for example, relies on just the right amount of the electrolyte potassium to create a heartbeat. Too much, or too little, can harm the heart. The kidneys help strike a balance by filtering electrolytes and water from the bloodstream. Dehydration forces the kidneys to preserve this balance by withholding water they normally dispose of in the form of urine. Overhydrating, on the other hand, can diminish electrolyte concentrations, forcing the kidneys to produce more urine. Runners who drink too much or too little water can place unnecessary stress on their kidneys.
• The heart and lungs: These work together to deliver oxygen throughout the body. Oxygen regulates body temperature, converts food into energy, and removes toxins. The heart-lung tandem works much harder during intense activities.
• The joints (the space between bones): Exercise can keep cartilage—the padded lining between bones—healthy. That said, running with an underlying joint condition, such as arthritis, can do more harm than good to the hips, knees, and ankles.
• Bones, muscles, and ligaments: Unhealthy bones, muscles, and ligaments (tissue connecting one bone to another) can’t sustain the same amount of force as they can when healthy. Too much force may cause a bone to fail, usually in the form of a bone stress injury or a stress fracture. It can also injure a tendon or sprain a ligament. Overexerting muscles in the lower body can also lead to painful muscle strains and cramps too. Age-related changes to tissues may occur over time. A runner typically experiences damage to these tissues as pain is confined to a specific location.

Warning Signs

Pay attention to your body throughout training, even if you don’t have a known underlying condition. Keep an eye out for:

• Pain that builds: Bone stress injuries can occur from improper running technique. If pain worsens in a specific area of the lower body—particularly if localized to a bone—stop running and see a sports medicine doctor. Pain may feel most noticeable when hopping on one leg. Swelling in a joint, or other mechanical symptoms associated with pain, can signal a joint injury. Painful sensations, or a loss of
• sensation, in the lower body can signal injuries to nerves that need evaluation.
• Dizzy spells: Feelings of light-headedness can occur from dehydration. The American Council on Exercise suggests drinking eight ounces of water 20 to 30 minutes before exercise. However, many runners will drink fluid regularly and can overhydrate. If light-headedness persists and chest pain occurs, see a sports cardiologist. It may signal an irregular heart rhythm. Some smartphone apps and wristwatches can detect an irregular heart rhythm and track heart rate.
• Heart rate: You can roughly determine where to keep your maximum heart rate at by subtracting your age from 220. Of course, many different factors can affect heart rate, such as family history, medications, and even temperatures, so this should not be taken as a perfect science, either. Near-fainting spells and repeatedly occurring palpitations can signal a more serious heart rate problem that needs medical attention.

Running 42.2 kilometres is no small feat and can feel incredibly rewarding, so celebrate the accomplishment. After completing the marathon, keep moving, but avoid completely stopping all physical activity. Low-impact exercises, such as cycling, walking, or swimming, can help muscles heal. If pain does not improve or prevents you from walking or bearing weight after a couple of weeks, see a medical professional immediately, as this can be a sign of a bone stress injury. Take some time for yourself before attempting your next marathon. 

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Read This Story in Our 2025 Inspiration Issue
Plus, meet the 36 fitness instructors named Canada’s Top Fitness Instructors in this issue. We’ve also got delicious plant based recipes, how to meal prep for success, make meaningful resolutions, practical fitness hacks, healthy morning habits and so much more!