Jul 6, 2020

What is Running Health, and how can it benefit my running?

simon

Running Health is a unique NURVV Run feature designed to give you personalised information on how healthy and sustainable your training is, helping you progress and improve over time, without risking injury or overtraining.

Featuring an easy-to-understand benchmark score and graph, Running Health is unlocked after your initial runs, ensuring NURVV has enough data to get an accurate overview of your running.

By crunching the data monitored by NURVV’s 32 precision sensors, Running Health’s radar graph shows your metrics in the key areas of running known to affect performance and injury risk. That same data is used to calculate a personalised Running Health Score – a benchmark number between 0-100 – to help you measure progress and identify areas for improvement, as well as giving actionable guidance to help you get there.

Why we created Running Health

‘Rather than having to dig through all your stats, Running Health does the work for you,’ says NURVV Run’s resident biomechanist Dr Grant Trewartha. ‘It looks at the individual factors we know can impact your injury risk – including your technique and training behaviour – and gives you one unified score so you can spot any factors you need to work on easily and monitor any trends.’

Those key areas are:

Training Load – your training behaviour over the past 28 days
Pronation – the rolling motion of your feet as you land
Cadence – the number of times your feet hit the ground as you run
Balance – the symmetry between the left and right side of your body as you run, including your cadence, step length, footstrike (how your foot hits the ground) and pronation balance

‘While one individual factor might not significantly increase your chance of injury if everything else is ok, if you start seeing issues across your profile then you’re creating an environment for elevated injury risk,’ says Grant.

‘If your Running Health Score is trending upwards, you’re on the right track. If it’s trending downwards, Running Health will highlight any areas to work on, let you drill down into the individual data, and give you the advice and tips you need to improve.’

Now you know the basics, here are just some of the ways Running Health can benefit your running.

Running Health helps you plan your ideal mileage for maximum gains and minimum injury risk

Whatever your running goals, finding the balance between training enough to improve performance and maintain fitness, without slipping into overtraining mode, can be tough.

Run too much and you risk injury and fatigue, run too little, and over time you’ll begin to lose that hard-earned fitness. Running Health helps you strike the optimal balance. By monitoring your training behaviour over the past 28 days, it gives you guidance and personalised mileage goals for each week, helping you progress your training safely and reducing the likelihood of overuse injuries.

Running Health identifies aspects of your technique to work on

Without access to a sports lab or running coach, it’s hard to know exactly how your body moves as you run. NURVV’s precision sensors monitor key aspects of your technique, including how your feet land as you run and any differences between the left and rights sides of your body, with the key data presented in Running Health.

Check out the Running Health graph on the app’s dashboard and you can immediately see any areas you can improve on to help you swerve injury and run more efficiently.

You can take a deep dive into the stats by clicking on any aspects of your technique the graph has highlighted – Pronation, Balance, Cadence and Training Load. This brings up details about how your performance in that area is trending over time and offers coaching tips and guidance to help you improve.

Running Health keeps you motivated

No matter how much you love running, some days it’s tough to get out there and get the miles in. Running Health can be a great motivator. Seeing your Running Health Score improve over time, or knowing it’ll decrease if you don’t log those miles, gives you a sense of accountability and can be just the motivation you need to pull on those trainers.