STRIDES Program: Leading the Way in Injury Reduction

Now, Western New York’s runners have access to a unique program specifically designed to maintain their health and help them achieve their goals as they participate in a sport that can place intense physical demands on them.

STRIDES (“Striving To Reduce Injuries During Endurance Sports”) has been developed by the physicians, therapists, athletic trainers and sports performance experts at Excelsior Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine.

“Runners and people who participate in other endurance sports have a very high incidence of musculoskeletal injuries, ” said Jason Matuszak, M.D., a board-certified primary care sports medicine physician and a partner at Excelsior Orthoapedics. “We developed STRIDES to address unique needs, including the effective treatment of injuries, prevention of future injuries and performance improvement.”

Asked about a typical first visit, Dr. Matuszak told OTW, “Obviously a lot depends on the severity or grade of injury. Although runners can be seen for any acute injury, most of the injured runners we see have overuse injuries, or injuries that occur through repetitive activity. We ask every injured runner to complete a runner’s history form on our website prior to their visit. We also ask them to bring in their current and/or most recent pair of running shoes so we can examine them for normal and abnormal wear patterns.”

“Our goals in evaluating the injured runner are both to determine what the injury is and, more importantly, why the injury occurred. The first visit is with one of our sports medicine physicians where they have an evaluation of their current injury, including a physical examination and pertinent diagnostic radiology services, like X-ray or musculoskeletal ultrasound or MRI (if appropriate). Once we have determined the nature and severity of the injury, we turn our attention to finding the things that may have predisposed the athlete to developing the problem. These could include differences in anatomy (like flat feet, being knock-kneed, or having a leg length discrepancy) and problems with the function of the structures (such as muscle weakness, range of motion deficits, or inflexibility). Sometimes we discover that it is primarily training errors or that their running shoes may not be the most appropriate choice for them. We also may perform gait analysis and look for biomechanical errors that may have caused the injury to occur. We work to address identified problems through physical therapy, gait retraining, footwear modification, or training modification and, at the same time, try our hardest to keep our runners as close to their level of activity as possible while we correct these issues.”