Hip extension loads the springs of the hip flexors.
Then the trailing leg recovers with an elastic, springlike recoil.
Slight forward lean at faster running speeds
The point of shoulder rotation is at the lower thoracic spine. The shoulder rotates opposite to the hips.
Is the knee slightly bent on landing, and the lower leg perpendicular to the ground? This helps avoid overstriding. (See picture on this page.)
Is the body upright at a slow jogging pace, but leans slightly forward at a faster pace? The runner shouldn’t bend forward from the waist or hyperextend the back.
Is the runner’s cadence about 180 steps a minute, and is there a short ground contact time?
Are the arms working for or against the runner? Are the elbows bent at 90 degrees or less, and the hands moving in a slight circular motion close to the chest? Knuckles shouldn’t stray far from the sternum, nor cross the center line. Is there evidence of rearward pull, as if chopping wood, and are the shoulders rotating slightly?
What is the strategy for increasing speed? Does the cadence remain fairly constant, while the stride length changes? At faster speeds, the stride angle (see the angle of the thighs in full stride, this page) opens as more force is applied to the ground. The ability to easily extend the stride indicates good mobility and hip extension.
A large stride angle. Note the arms driving back, as if chopping wood.
Are the pelvis and hips in positions of strength? At midstance the pelvis should be level, with minimal crossover of the legs. The feet land under the hips, and the pelvis is supported with a strong hip and core.
A level pelvis, and minimal leg crossover
AN UNCONVENTIONAL TREADMILL
At my running store in West Virginia, we have been teaching running form with the help of a simple device that has an unusual ability to fix flaws especially in body position: the TrueForm Runner, a motorless treadmill. The deck of this innovative machine is slightly bowed—concave from front to back—such that it offers some resistance as you move the belt.
The TrueForm Runner, a runner-powered treadmill
The TrueForm is helpful for doing self-analysis of gait, because it’s impossible to run smoothly and comfortably on it unless you have good balance, posture, rhythm, glute function, and hip extension. You provide the motive power for the treadmill, and adjustments to your pace and form are entirely up to you. You cannot overstride, because extending your foot in front and landing on your heel slows or stops the motion of the belt. Similarly, the concave design demands that you engage the powerful muscles in the posterior chain, especially the glutes, to keep everything moving. It’s a true “lie detector” of running form.
Adults and kids are invited in to run and play on this treadmill in our store, and I’ve enjoyed seeing them relearn their balance through trial and error (or trial and effort, if you like). Children get it and adjust almost immediately. They learn unconsciously—quickly developing the neural pathways needed to initiate and sustain efficient movement.
A varsity runner from the local high school was having knee pain, and I had him hop on the treadmill. I could see that he was tight in the hips (as most runners are), and wasn’t fully engaging his glutes. Despite his high level of fitness, he had difficulty moving the belt. He stepped off the treadmill and did exercises to open up his hips (Mountain Climbers, in the drills from the previous chapter) and to activate his glutes (running in place while pulling against a tether, described on this page.). Then he hopped back on the TrueForm. I gave him some simple cues, and he was off and flying. “A lightbulb switched on,” he later said, “and my knee pain has disappeared.”
When you don’t overstride, and at the same time activate the posterior chain (the glutes and hamstrings), the patellar compressive forces are lessened. The knee can then function as the hinge it was meant to be—not as a shock absorber. This routine won’t fix all knee pain, but it often helps in cases of anterior knee pain. Fixing the gait is the first line of treatment—not part-specific rehab. The TrueForm helps runners recognize the motion and the cues that they need to reproduce during their daily training.
AND, RELAX…
When making any change to your form—to any routine, really—you should make it incrementally. Your body will adapt, as long as the forces and loads applied do not exceed the natural capacity to recover from some mild, consistent new stresses. Mild to moderate stress (“eustress”) with adequate recovery time leads to positive adaptation and strength.
Too many of us are tight and constrained when we run, including in the upper body. The shoulders, arms, and hands should be relaxed. To facilitate this, you can take a few seconds before you run to “shake yourself loose.” When you begin running, think about your hands. Instead of a fist, imagine holding potato chips between your fingers. (This is probably the only good use for potato chips.) Try relaxing your lower jaw.
When you practice and train, remember that your feet, legs, and body are doing what they were built for. As children, we ran, jumped, and bounded in our bare feet, as if on springs. We still have much of this near-magical childlike elasticity and bounce. We just need to wake up our natural springs, dial them into a pattern of fluid operation, and enjoy the ride.
The “sweet spot” represents the area of beneficial eustress.
Greater or lesser levels of stress don’t build health or fitness.
DRILLS
Drills for developing efficient, safe running form are easy to perform and generate little harmful impact, if done correctly and progressively. Throughout, keep your balance centered and your position neutral. Pain and injury tend to originate with bad posture.
Study the short list of drills below and try them. They should be performed at least twice a week for progression, then once a week for maintenance, preferably on a day when you aren’t fatigued. Warm up with at least ten to fifteen minutes of light running. (I prefer doing drills at the end of runs when I’m warm and loose.) Cut your run a bit short if you need to allocate ten to fifteen minutes to practicing the drills.
Throughout, the goal is to reinforce proper movement patterns and technique, not to build fitness. As the five principles of good running form converge into smooth, efficient movement, these patterns will become your normal default form.
Form = function
Jog slowly in your bare feet on a firm surface. It’s safe to take your shoes off and jog tediously slow, even more slowly than a walk. This teaches you impact moderating behavior. Visualize horses trotting out gently to the starting gate at a stakes race. Tap, tap, tap, not thud, thud, thud. Start with a minute or two.
To avoid injury, it’s important to reset and maintain your balance in all planes—front to back, and side to side. Too often, runners sustain injuries that could be prevented by a daily maintenance routine of balancing the body. The simplest balance drill for running is one-legged running: run five steps on one leg (with quick on-and-off-the-ground movement), then switch legs and repeat. Slowly build this drill until you can do it for two to three minutes, alternating legs.
A safe and effective drill for feeling and activating the glutes, and for cadence and foot placement, is to run in place with a tether. Perform this drill on the ground or on a mini-trampoline. With a stretchy tether (such as a mountain bike inner tube) restraining you, you’ll see that it doesn’t work to use your hamstrings or your hip flexors to lift your legs with each step. Throughout, think about driving the foot down and back, and popping off the ground (or mini-trampoline surface) with your glutes. Work on your coordination and balance as you do this. Alternatively, turn this into a power drill and try pulling a tire or a sled.
The razor scooter or skateboard is fun, and also excellent practice for foot placement. Powering forward requires ext
ending from the hip while using the glutes. It’s not possible to propel a scooter with an overstride, heel-landing pattern.
Run forward while skipping rope. This helps build posture, balance, foot placement, and rhythm, and helps you find your natural cadence. It activates your feet and reduces ground contact time, and makes it difficult to overstride. If skipping rope feels “sticky,” be sure to add it to your routine, even if only for a couple of minutes each day.
View the samples of good and bad running posture shown in the short video clip “1, 2, 3, Run!” (on the videos page of the book’s website), and begin your workouts with this drill. Get tall. Run in place with a springy cadence. Then move your face a bit forward. You are off and running!
Watch and learn
The goal of all of these drills is to become “unconsciously competent”—to reach the relaxed, natural state of not having to think about what you are doing. It may be helpful to watch efficient running form in action, as illustrated in “Principles of Natural Running with Dr. Mark Cucuzzella” on the videos page of runforyourlifebook.com. I’m barefoot in this footage to best demonstrate the complex movement of the foot and ankle. Long-distance barefoot running may not be for everyone, but over short distances on a safe surface it will help you learn how your feet and body move without shoes. You’ll find that barefoot running is difficult if you have poor form because, quite simply, forceful impact with the ground hurts. You have no choice but to run softly and correctly. Our feet are messengers from the world around us, and they have much to teach. But before we get there, let’s build some strength and endurance, which we’ll do in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 7
The Engine That Runs Us: Building Endurance
You are not training to run an event. What you are training for is to live a long and productive life and maintain health optimally. For that there is no question that whatever is sustainable is the best type of training.
—DR. TIM NOAKES
MYTH: High-intensity, push-the-envelope workouts will make you stronger, and you can forgo low-intensity workouts.
FACT: High-intensity training, in isolation, creates a toxic, acidic environment in your muscles. It inhibits aerobic development, and will ultimately break you down.
MYTH: When you are exercising, sugar is the best fuel to keep you going.
FACT: Fat is a more efficient fuel than sugar; it causes less physiological stress, and produces greater quantities of useful energy.
Now that we’re properly “positioned” for running, it’s time to work on the endurance that will lengthen our distances, improve our times, and restore our health.
A few years ago I got to know a thirty-six-year-old Air Force musician named Adam Porter. Like many other Airmen, he trained intensively but minimally for a short period just prior to the annual Air Force fitness test, hoping to regather enough fitness to get a passing grade. But as he “trained,” he lost the modest gains he’d made to a combination of burnout, overexertion, and boredom. One year, he failed the test outright, then tried again—and failed again. He had four sons to support, yet was at risk of forfeiting his military career.
I spent a day with him discussing running technique, nutrition, and the concept of maximum aerobic fitness. Mainly, I wanted him to start his training gradually (and well ahead of the test), and to elevate his heart rate to no more than 70 percent of its maximum. Sticking to this plan reduced him to a jog not much speedier than a fast walk. But at the slow pace of 12 minutes and 30 seconds per mile, he was able to work on the principles of natural running form: slowing down, maintaining his balance and gait, not overstriding, bounding, or plodding. Just a smooth, fluid stride.
It took seven months, but Adam shaved four minutes off his mile time. He can now run a mile in 8½ minutes at a heart rate of less than 140 beats per minute. His weight went from 215 pounds to 185.
“My goal is to score in the 90s on the fitness test,” Adam told me, “and to break my 10K personal record of 47:11.” By following the endurance methods explained in this chapter, Adam was able to reach his goal. He scored 100 percent on the running portion of the fitness test.
Most all of us can readily do the same thing.
IT ALL STARTED BACK…
In the 1960s, a New Zealand running coach named Arthur Lydiard became a national legend when he guided his team to an unprecedented string of five gold medals, two silver medals, and two bronze medals in the Olympics. Lydiard had developed a revolutionary training regimen that—counterintuitively—was based on slowing down training speeds for medium and long distances. He exhorted his runners to “train, don’t strain” by having them run at a consistent, relaxed, comfortable pace. This technique, and the principles of physiology that Lydiard drew upon, now guides virtually all endurance-building training programs, and it is widely accepted as the surefire means to building a foundation for health and fitness.
EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED
Let’s take a moment to look at the remarkable biology and physiology that make this work.
As we breathe (from the diaphragm, especially), oxygen diffuses from the lungs into the bloodstream, where it attaches to hemoglobin in the blood. The circulatory system (especially where it branches out to the tiniest blood vessels, our 60,000 miles of capillaries) delivers the oxygen-rich hemoglobin to the working muscles to engage in aerobic activity. We’re off and running.
If oxygen is a good thing, you’d think that hyperventilating would help boost oxygen delivery and improve performance. Instead, you feel lightheaded when you hyperventilate, because you are blowing off carbon dioxide, too, and a low level of CO2 in the blood increases the oxygen molecules’ affinity for hemoglobin. Breathing more slowly allows CO2 levels to naturally rise, which expedites offloading of oxygen to the tissues.
We don’t live (and run) by oxygen alone. Fuel is needed, too, and is stored in the liver as liver glycogen, in the muscles as muscle glycogen, and to a lesser degree in the blood, as blood glucose. (Our blood contains only a teaspoon of glucose, and this level must be maintained within a narrow range. Thus the blood offers no effective sugar storage, nor a buffer against fluctuations. Think of releasing a constant flow of water from an impoundment, but with no reservoir for storage.)
We also carry with us an abundant supply of fuel as lipids, mainly in the form of triglycerides, the building blocks of fat. Some of this fat energy is stored in the belly and around our internal organs as visceral fat, or white fat—the unhealthy kind (that is also difficult to shed). By contrast, fat stored in subcutaneous tissue, or brown fat, is metabolically healthy fat. So is muscular fat, which is carried in our intramuscular stores. The latter two fats are more accessible to us for metabolism and as energy sources than belly fat. Brown fat is abundant with mitochondria.
THE MIGHTY MITOCHONDRIA
The magic happens when the oxygen and fuel converge in the billions of mitochondria—the powerful energy factories within the cells that are stationed around and through our muscle fibers. Each cardiac muscle cell contains about five thousand mitochondria. A biceps muscle has about two hundred. These mitochondria transform potential energy into motion by converting the glycogen and glucose into ATP (adenosine triphosphate, the currency of muscle contraction).
At the same time, through a different process, the triglycerides (building blocks of fat) are mobilized into free fatty acids and glycerol. This is helped along by lipoprotein lipase (LPL), a hormone-sensitive enzyme, through aerobic processes called oxidative phosphorylation and beta oxidation. These are then converted (in the mitochondria) to the ATP that the muscles demand. Amino acids from protein enter this cycle, too, but to a lesser degree.
Ultimately, how we metabolize our fuel—the efficiency with which we convert it into movement and expel waste products—determines how far and fast we run.
The multiple substrates and fuel pathways of aerobic metabolism, lea
ding to the Krebs cycle and oxidative phosphorylation, to produce ATP. Glycogen and triglycerides are the main fuels that we draw upon for locomotion, but protein can also be broken down into glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis.
This isn’t the optimal use of proteins, however, as they are needed for other, “higher,” nonlocomotive functions in the maintenance of health.
THE TWO PRIMARY SYSTEMS OF METABOLISM
For a moment, think of the human body as a car, with the lungs as the air intake; the liver and muscle glycogen as small fuel tanks; our body fat as the large fuel tank; the heart as fuel pump; the mitochondria as spark plugs; and our working muscles and fascia as pistons.
Although visceral (belly) fat may form the largest fuel tank, it suffers from an annoying problem: its prodigious reserves of energy are mostly locked up, and aren’t readily accessible for use by our muscles. This is why belly fat, unfortunately, is so difficult to shed.
A more apt comparison is to a hybrid vehicle, because the fuel in our bodies is burned via two converging metabolic pathways—sugar burning and fat burning. These two metabolic systems work together, not unlike the paired-up combo of a gasoline engine and an electric motor. Let’s take a look at how they combine forces to make the human body the most efficient rig on the road:
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