Hi, I want to talk to you today about leaking when you are running downhill.

So I work with lots of female runners who are fine, and they don’t leak if they’re running on flat ground. But anytime they start to go downhill, that is where they run into some problems. And it’s totally common when we’re running downhill, we’re absorbing more force up off the ground. And oftentimes, we’re doing things with our bodies, that just put us in a position where we’re more likely to leak.

So if you have an issue running downhill, and leaking then this video is for you. And here are a few different strategies, you can try to help decrease that leaking.

So the first one is leaning forward. So when we run down the hill, we often have this positioning of leaning back with our foot out in front of us. We have this braking force and we’re trying to slow down. Or we’re not letting ourselves run down the hill. And this position is not great for your pelvic floor to provide you as much support as it could. And so simply think about just a gentle lean forward as you run down that hill.

The second thing you can try is, bringing your foot more underneath your body. So instead of landing with that heel, way out in front of you, can you come more onto your forefoot or your midfoot? 

And you can do this by thinking about landing softly, or increasing that cadence. And playing around with those different things. You just don’t want that foot way out in front of you, and landing really hard on that heel. If you can bring it more underneath your body, it will decrease the force that you have to absorb. It will decrease the amount of work your pelvic floor has to do and then decrease the leaking.

The last thing is you really want to find that area where you’re not leaking. But maybe you could or it might feel like you might or maybe just leak a little bit, we consider that your fence. we want to find that and we want to live there. And that’s how we’re going to build capacity. That’s how we’re going to produce change and your body is going to adapt.

So an example might be if you can’t run down a really steep hill, but you can find an area where you can practice running more medium hills. Practice there. And then when you get to those really steep ones, maybe that’s where you walk, and you practice a little bit of a lean forward.

Or if you can’t run downhill at all, you start with just walking and maybe implement either leaning forward a little bit or work on that foot landing a little bit more underneath your body. Practice there and then start to do a little bit smaller down hills and build yourself up there. So we want to find that area that can challenge you. That’s how your body will change.

So these are a few different ideas you can try to implement if you are someone who struggles to run downhill without leaking.