Baseball is famous for its unwritten rules — you don’t bunt to break up a no-hitter and you don’t talk to a pitcher who’s throwing one — but most every sport has its own unofficial canon.
For runners, one of the most repeated is the 10% rule. Never increase your weekly mileage by more than 10% from one week to the next.
The thinking, said Dr. David Bazett-Jones, is that pushing weekly mileage changes above that percentage increases the likelihood that runners will suffer an injury. Empirical research into that rule, however, is thin and predominantly limited to adults.
Bazett-Jones, an associate professor of athletic training at The University of Toledo, is looking to change that with what aims to be the largest study of its kind.
Throughout cross-country seasons for the next few years, Bazett-Jones is tracking the activity of hundreds of high school runners from across the country to better understand the relationship between increased mileage and injuries.
“We’re logging every mile they run — how they felt, their perceived exertion, the intensity of the run,” he said. “Then we’ll use that to look at week-to-week changes in the load they’re experiencing and try to figure out if we can determine a number where we can say, ‘Don’t go over this if you’re trying to prevent injuries in the future.’ ”
The study is being funded by a grant from the National Athletic Trainers Association’s Research and Education Foundation, which typically funds just one or two projects per year.
This year, Bazett-Jones was the only researcher to receive funding.
While being able to prove — or rewrite — the 10% rule would be noteworthy, the project’s real aim is to reduce injuries in young athletes so they can continue running well beyond their adolescence.
“We know that running, like other physical activities, has a positive effect on overall health,” Bazett-Jones said. “If we can understand how to reduce the potential for injury, that means kids are going to continue to be physically active and continue to run into college, adulthood and middle age.”
That’s especially important for runners, as some research has shown that when runners get injured and have to give up the sport they love, they don’t often replace it with another activity.
“You would think they might pick up swimming or some other sport but they don’t,” he said. “If they can’t run, they tend to become much less active. If we can predict the first injury, we can prevent a second injury.”
