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On Form Physiotherapy

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27/10/2026

Your taper has started. By Thursday you’ll want to undo it.

The sequence is so consistent it’s almost a joke. You cut the volume, correctly. Around day four the legs turn to concrete, a niggle appears from nowhere, and you’re quietly certain you’ve lost months of fitness. So you add a session back — and that’s the taper gone.

It’s the opposite of how it feels. The training you removed was masking the fatigue, not causing it. Underneath, glycogen is climbing and muscle damage markers are falling. You feel flat. You’re getting faster.

The research is unusually clear: cut volume by about half, keep your paces exactly as they were, and keep the same number of running days. Two weeks is the sweet spot.

Which is where the two races split. Half and 23K on a two-week taper — day four is this Thursday. Longer Feral Pig distances on three weeks, yours has already passed, and your risk is the opposite: feeling good and deciding there’s room for one more big day. Though three weeks is convention rather than evidence — there’s almost nothing published on tapering for ultra distances.

Niggles now are normal, and race week is the wrong time to investigate one. Settle it down, start nothing new. The exception: sharp, localised pain you can point to with one finger that doesn’t warm up. Worth a call.

Done properly a taper is worth about 3%. Nothing else between now and the start line comes close.

Full guide on the blog, link in bio.

22/10/2026

If your knee hurts when you run, you’ve been told your glutes are weak.

It’s the most repeated piece of advice in running injury, and it comes from everywhere — physios, coaches, training partners, the internet. Strengthen your hips, the knee pain goes away.

Keep doing the exercises. We’ll come back to why. But the explanation attached to them doesn’t hold up, and that matters more than it sounds like it should.

The story was built on cross-sectional research — measuring people who already have knee pain and comparing them with people who don’t. Those studies agree: adults with patellofemoral pain do have weaker hips.

15/10/2026

If you’re racing Busselton on 6 December, you’re about to hit the biggest weeks of your build. Here’s the thing most people get backwards about them.

More training doesn’t automatically mean more fitness. Volume builds fitness right up until it outruns what you can recover from — past that point the extra hours add fatigue, not adaptation.

The peak weeks feel like the dangerous part. They mostly aren’t.

Injury risk tracks relative change, not absolute load — how far beyond your recent normal a session goes. Early in a build, when your baseline is low, a modest session can be a 40% jump. By the time you’re deep into the block your baseline has climbed to meet the training, and the same big week is a far smaller relative step.

06/10/2026

Race week for the Perth Running Festival. Here’s the hardest part: there is nothing you can do this week that makes you fitter.

That’s not defeatism, it’s arithmetic. Any session you do now won’t produce an adaptation until after you’ve crossed the line. All it can deliver before Sunday is fatigue.

So the work this week isn’t training. It’s protecting what you’ve already banked.

The research on tapering is unusually consistent for sports science. A meta-analysis of 27 studies found the strongest performance effect came from cutting training volume by 41–60%, progressively, while leaving intensity and frequency alone. Not easier sessions. Not fewer days. Shorter sessions at the same paces.

The average gain is around 3%. On a four-hour marathon that’s roughly seven minutes — more than you’ll find anywhere else in the last fortnight.The part nobody warns you about is how bad it feels. Around day four or five most people get heavy legs, broken sleep, phantom niggles and a creeping certainty they’ve lost all their fitness. You haven’t. The volume you removed was masking the fatigue, not causing it, and your body reads freshness as untrained.

Underneath, glycogen is climbing, muscle damage markers are falling, and strength is measurably improving. None of it is perceptible from the inside.

And if something has started niggling this week — that’s common, and it’s usually attention rather than injury. You don’t have the runway to rehabilitate anything now. You have enough to settle it down and get to the start line. Don’t start a new stretch, a new strength exercise or a new pair of shoes this week.

Full breakdown of how to taper properly, including where the evidence disagrees with itself, is on the blog.

Good luck Sunday.

29/09/2026

Most bike fits start by measuring the bike. We start by assessing the rider.

Here’s why that order matters.

Saddle height, setback, reach and stack can all be measured precisely and still be wrong for you — because the “correct” numbers come from population averages, not from your hips, your spine, or the injury you’ve been managing since autumn.

So before we touch a bolt, we look at three things:

→ How far you can move
→ How well you move through that range
→ How much of it you can control

A rider with limited hip flexion and a stiff thoracic spine needs a different cockpit to a rider with neither — same frame, same height, completely different setup. Put them both in the textbook position and one of them spends the season fighting it.

And the test that matters isn’t how the position looks on a fit chart. It’s whether you can still hold it at the end of a long ride. A position you can only hold fresh isn’t a fast position — it’s a photo.

Timing matters more than people expect. Small errors hide on short rides and surface on long ones, which is exactly what spring does to your training. Sorted now, it’s an adjustment. Left until you’re deep in a build, it’s an adjustment plus time off the bike.

Bike fitting at On Form is done by an APA Titled Sport & Exercise Physiotherapist with over a decade treating endurance athletes, so the assessment isn’t an add-on — it’s the starting point.

If something’s niggling on the bike, or you’re about to add a lot of hours, get the position looked at first.

Book at onformphysio.com.au

25/09/2026

Your Achilles hurts, so you stop running. The pain settles — and so does the tendon’s capacity. You come back to the same training load with less tissue than you had.

You may not need to stop at all.

Silbernagel and colleagues randomised 38 people with Achilles tendinopathy. One group kept running and jumping through rehab. The other rested from those activities for six weeks. Six weeks on, their symptoms were no different — but only one group had lost six weeks of running.

The group that kept going weren’t just training through it. They followed rules:
- Pain up to 3/10 during the session. Still under 3/10 the next morning. And the one everybody forgets — pain and stiffness must not climb from one week to the next.

That last one is the whole thing. A single good session tells you very little. The weekly trend tells you everything.

If it keeps climbing despite backing off, that’s when it needs a plan rather than a rule.

18/09/2026

Why is October our busiest month?

Everyone quotes the 10% rule. A study that tracked 735 runners through 16 weeks of marathon training found breaking it wasn’t linked to injury at all.

What did predict injury was far more specific — a single session going too far beyond your longest run of the past 30 days. Not your weekly total. That one run.
Which is why September catches people. The mornings warm up, the evenings stretch out, the calendar fills. The ride gets longer, the run moves earlier, the squad restarts. Each sport creeps up a little. The total climbs a lot, and nobody decided to do it.
Then tissue lags. Tendon and bone adapt more slowly than your fitness does, so you feel ready well before you are. The bill arrives weeks later.

The runners who avoided rapid increases got injured less. It’s the speed of the change, not the size of the number.

One sport up per week. Not all three.

Racing Perth Running Festival on 11 October? That’s a race build stacked on the seasonal one.

Full breakdown at the link in bio.

14/09/2026

Most swim shoulder pain in triathletes isn’t a technique fault. It’s a volume problem wearing a technique costume.

If you’ve gone from a couple of off-season swims a month to three or four a week, that’s one of the biggest proportional jumps you’ll make all season — bigger than anything in your run or bike build. The shoulder complains, and the reflex is to book a stroke correction session.

Sometimes that’s right. Often it’s arithmetic.
Here’s the useful part: rotation range tends to change before pain does. So if you test these three weekly — same day, when you’re feeling good — you’ll have a baseline, and you’ll see a problem coming instead of discovering it mid-set.

Swipe for the three tests. They take two minutes and you need a wall.

10/09/2026

Today is R U OK? Day.

We see a lot of people at a strange moment — the week their season ended, or the month they realised the niggle wasn’t going away. And we’ve learned that the hardest part often isn’t the injury.

Sport takes up more room than people realise. It’s the routine, the group you train with, the thing you’re known for. An injury can take all of that at once, and there’s no scan for that part.

If someone you train with has gone quiet, or stopped turning up, or answers “fine” a bit too quickly — ask them again. You don’t need the right words and you don’t need to fix anything. Asking twice is usually enough to get a real answer.

Lifeline 13 11 14 · ruok.org.au

08/09/2026

Ironman WA is on 6 December. That’s 13 weeks, which means most Busselton builds start about now.

Almost everyone plans around the same assumption — that the dangerous part is November, when the long ride hits five hours and the long run creeps past two.
The largest running study ever run suggests that’s backwards. What predicts injury isn’t your weekly load. It’s a single session going too far beyond your longest run of the past month. And the biggest jumps, proportionally, happen at the start of a build when your baseline is lowest.

Week 3: 10km to 14km. That’s 40%.
Week 11: 28km to 30km. That’s 7%.

The peak weeks feel harder. That’s not the same as riskier.

Full post linked in bio — including what to do about it, and why the swim is where most triathletes come unstuck.

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Rockingham, WA
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https://www.onformphysio.com.au/

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