Scott clinic helps reduce pain from running Published Aug. 12, 2015 By Senior Airman Sarah Hall-Kirchner 375th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. -- Members of the military spend a lot of their time running. Every branch has a running component to their physical fitness test and standards. Many people can experience pain while they run, and the Pain Free Running Clinic offers possible solutions to managing and fixing the pain that sometimes occurs from running. Al Bromley, 375th Aerospace Medicine Squadron Health Promotions Flight Exercise Physiologist, leads the class. The purpose of the class is to discuss running techniques and talk about running injuries, ways to stay healthy with running, and how to avoid injuries while running. "We discuss a lot of different avenues and bring things up to make people think about how they are running and why they are in pain," said Bromley. "People try to ignore their bodies and run through pain instead of addressing the pain, and that's a perfect recipe for running into your next injury." Staff Sgt. Marie Carroll, 932nd Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron, attended the Pain Free Running Clinic for many reasons. "I've been a long time runner," Carroll said. "I took this course to improve on those skills and decrease my run time." The Pain Free Running Clinic aims to help people improve their running through posture, proper foot-striking, breathing, warming up, speed control and proper shoes. Errors in these fields can cause pain while running. During the class, Bromley explains proper running posture, how to warm up and cool down, how to gradually build speed by building endurance, and how to pick a shoe that's right for each individual. Bromley emphasizes that pain during running does happen, and that in order to become better, you have to feel some pain, but not the bad pain. He also emphasized that each individual should listen to their pain level, because people know their own bodies. "When people have bad pain, we want people to analyze themselves and have a basic knowledge of what to do next after an injury to mitigate the injury, heal themselves, and then train in a healthy fashion," he said. "We don't want people to train more and more on an injury, we want people to stay healthy and embrace the benefits of running and avoid injury at the same time." A main component of the class looks at how each individual's foot strikes the ground while running. Ideally, a natural running style is to strike the ground with the middle of the foot, termed mid-foot striking. This is where the ball of the foot to the arch of the foot strikes the ground first as the runner is propelled forward, followed by the heel. "A mid-foot striking pattern lowers impact on joints and the risk of injury and is biomechanically more efficient," said Bromley. "Unfortunately, a lot of us in America with expensive running shoes are heel-strikers, so we over-stride, over-extend, slamming our heels into the ground, which is very high impact. Heel-striking increases the risk of injury and is less biomechanically efficient." The techniques discussed during class, like improving posture during running, encourage the body to naturally fall into a mid-foot striking pattern. After the class, Bromley said he hopes people can run without pain or without the bad pain. He hopes people who take the class embrace the change. "We want people to enjoy running as they go down the road," Bromley said.