Tag Archives: running form

Jun 02 2021
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No easy run is a junk run if you use it well

Today I went out for a training run. Last night I watched some old Sage Canaday videos on YouTube addressing anterior pelvic tilt, and adjustments you can make in training to improve your lower body range of motion.

I run with a short stride and am not big on overstriding or butt kick drills, so my legs don’t kick particularly far back in my stride unless I’m really hoofing it (e.g. hurrying across a street or after a city bus), and then my stride kick naturally lengthens back. However, running with that kind of power is personally kind of tiring. And a good deal of that currently has to do with my hips doing the classic runner’s tilt forward, aka the anterior pelvic tilt.

I wanted yesterday to work on tipping the hips back into alignment, running taller, and seeing about generating more of a kick back on my stride. I decided to work on it in this morning’s run.

Quickly, I discovered that the kick back is a bit too contrived in my current range of motion… but that trying to do so led to a productive form improvement: My foot naturally drove back after contacting the ground, generating in turn more forward momentum in my stride.

Throughout the run I consciously made this effort to drive the foot down and push the foot back, in turn driving my momentum forward. I don’t think my leg kicked back that far, but my stride definitely got longer and more productive right off the bat.

This did shrink some as it was rather hot outside and my focus switched to just moving at a minimum of excess energy to complete the run. But Stryd showed my form power had also slightly decreased, a positive sign of efficiency. Heat aside, the run itself did feel better than previous runs.

I mention all this as an example of how I put easy runs to use.

I don’t consider my work break runs or easy runs “junk miles”. To me, junk miles are runs without a specifically beneficial purpose, that wear you out more than benefit you.

Previously, most of my Chicago miles had a practical purpose: I transported myself home at least in part by my running. So to some degree I needed to run them regardless of how I felt.

That’s not the case in Vegas, since we here drive everywhere. If I go out for a run, there’s got to be a good reason I’m doing that and not just cross training. It does wear on you to run, and I’m over 40 now, so I need to get a return on investment from my runs.

I started work break runs because a) I easily could, and b) it helped get me in condition for more serious running once I ramped up training.

Now that I’ve started Indy Marathon training, these work break runs can provide extra fitness in addition to my base training runs in the morning. But so can reducing them to a walk, especially now that it’s getting hot in Las Vegas. Why continue to run them?

Well, I’ve now gotten to the point in my experience where I put these easy runs to use as I mentioned above. These are the situations where I work on a form adjustment, on increasing my cadence, emphasizing my planted foot drive, driving my knees, etc.

If anything, the work runs are perfect for this in that they’re only 8-13 minutes long, less than a mile or only a bit more than a mile, and even if I’m having a tough time, it’s over in short order. Whether or not I’m adding fitness and chops by taking them, I am getting the practice and experience of implementing these adjustments and seeing how they work, in small doses. I have plenty of opportunities to practice plenty of adjustments, without risking or sacrificing my health or training in trying to do them in a longer training run.

Sasha Pachev may have done them to keep himself from feeling too sedentary. But I find the work break runs are useful to try and practice various adjustments in my form and practice. They’re hardly junk miles in that respect.

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Aug 10 2020
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Exercise, General health, Running, Shoes, Training

On the Perils of Padded Shoes

I’m a believer in Phil Maffetone‘s approach to aerobic training, which is basically that you should do most training at no more than 75% of your max heart rate.

This doesn’t mean I don’t ever do anaerobic work, or speedwork, or anything else that elevates your heart rate past that. I just default my aerobic training to that lowered maximum. It’s also similar to the 80/20 approach that Matt Fitzgerald vouches for.

Maffetone is also in that esoteric ‘do everything barefoot’ camp, and it’s a key reason the Primal Blueprint’s Mark Sisson aligned with his beliefs in writing Primal Endurance. I don’t subscribe to that mostly because I live in cities where soft ground is often littered with hidden sharp objects, many of which can be very dangerous. I’ll trade the benefits of barefoot running for the needed safety of wearing shoes during exercise, thanks.

But I bring up Maffetone to talk about this piece on shoes that I’ve long since had loaded on a browser tab for discussion. Much like how Sisson wrote his “I hate endurance training BUT if I were to train for a marathon…” piece, Maffetone is anti-shoes but here he writes a piece on what kind of shoes you should get if you need them.

I’m always a supporter of the “not my thing but here’s a good way to do it if you must” perspective. I like being open minded to different approaches, even when I have convincing reasons not to follow them. I know others will follow them, and long as no one’s getting hurt or killed in doing so we’re typically better off helping each other maximize those efforts.

But, as I do, I digress. Maffetone raises a good point about what I call “The Hoka One One Problem”: We like padded shoes, but they’re not good for us.

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Feb 05 2020
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Exercise, General health, Running, Training

Training progressions, stabilization, and running health

I’m learning a borderline unfathomable amount of information from my Personal Trainer course, and a lot of it applies just as well to running as it does to general strength training.

It’s hard to get into much of what I’m learning right now, especially given I’m studying for new material through the accelerated program and I need to focus on processing all that information on top of still trying to ingrain the previous information.

One thing that sits with me is the NASM structure to training progression known as the OPT model. The basic premise is that, before you should work on maximizing strength and athleticism, you first need to work on and improve the stabilization of your existing muscle systems.

The idea is that your muscles have some natural imbalances, and jumping right into swolework or athletic drills not only can risk injury but also further solidify and thus complicate those imbalances.

Someone with an incredible amount of strength or athletic development might actually be surprisingly weak in a key core muscle group, and if this person has recurring injury or performance problems that weakness could be a key factor in their problems. It may seem like a step back to work solely on stabilization basics, but in reality improvement here avoids bigger, longer setbacks in more serious situations.

Going back to running… even prior to this training, I could watch someone run for a few moments and immediately point out what kind of injury problems they either have dealt with or will deal with. I could see mechanically what was limiting them.

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May 03 2019
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Exercise, General health, Running, Training

Cool, and certainly not impossible

CoolImpossibleCaveat: I’ve talked before about books relevant to training plans I’ve reviewed, but I’m not big on book reviews. I’ll talk about my thoughts on reading this book, but this is not totally a review of the book. If interested, look up reviews of the book or browse a copy separately on your own. And of course, if you disagree with any of the following… cool.

A few weeks back at a local bookstore I stumbled upon and bought a book by Eric Orton called The Cool Impossible. Orton gained fame in Christopher MacDougal’s book Born To Run, about Christopher’s journey to run the Copper Canyon ultra with the uncanny endurance-running Tarahumara natives of northwest Mexico.

Eric Orton coached Chris through training for the ultra, and his personally developed methods (derived in no small part from what he learned with the Tarahumara) find their way into this book I found a few weeks ago.

I read this book and unlike other running books it doesn’t map out a training plan to prepare for a goal race. Instead, what training plan the book has intends to rebuild your running ability through balance and strength exercises using slant/wobble boards and a balance ball, and later through perfecting your running form and cadence through drills and then shorter bouts of running that grow gradually longer over 26 weeks (including the initial strength building phase) of general training.

Orton details how the Tarahumara run on custom-made minimalist shoes made from old tires on uneven, rocky trails that constantly require stepping on and pushing off from uneven terrain. Most runners in civlization run on cleaner, flatter surfaces, and don’t develop the nuanced lower body strength from running on rocky terrain that the Tarahumara do.

Reading through these anecdotes and Orton’s breakdown of the subsequent exercises, two ideas jumped out at me.

1) Virtually no one else who coaches or writes about running even talks about this, let alone works on or teaches how to do this.

In fact, most running coaches probably have no idea how to run on truly uneven terrain, even if they run trails or trail races. Such runners probably stick to paths and then just tiptoe through these sections that Orton and the Tarahumara have the nuanced strength to run straight through.

2) Hey wait, I already do this.

Growing up in dry hot Vegas, what grass we had in the schoolyard and parks was largely unmaintained. It was mowed and occasionally weedwacked, sure. But we played soccer and ran laps over lumpy, rugged grass whose random bumps and divots you perhaps got used to over time.

Add in running over dusty desert dirt, the random consistency of what pavement there was, and I got a lot of practice growing up in running over uneven terrain. I wasn’t even a distance runner.

Once I got seriously into distance running so many years later, I was among the few who had no problem taking my run onto the dirt fringes of the Lakefront Trail, or even onto the similarly rugged, inconsistent grass terrain.

Whenever I slip in icy terrain during winter, I have the proprioception to stay balanced and continue forward without falling or getting hurt. Even when I do trip or slip and begin to fall, I have the awareness, balance and strength to often stay on my feet, or at least land safely without injury.

Over my life I’ve been in a few messy homes, workplaces, classrooms, and got used to stepping through and over a variety of mess, stepping accidentally on all sorts of random things, and staying balanced when that happened.

That certainly helped when I got into theatre and dance, and that sort of dynamic balance came in handy. Add in the deep movement training of both disciplines, and having that now-natural perception helped a lot when I later got into distance running.

I realize I’m not a typical case, that most other people won’t have this ability or awareness if they don’t discover and work on it. Sure, they may have some, but a lot of them tiptoe through tough spots, or hurt something as soon as they step off-balance on something. A book like this might actually be really useful for a large number of such runners.

Meanwhile, while I might get some value out of some of the exercises or the renovative training plan (probably after the Chicago Marathon in October, though)… the idea of, say, balancing on one foot on a slanted surface isn’t new territory for me. In fact, I had to do stuff like that in George Lewis’ Meyerhold Biomechanics theatre class every week.

A few weeks ago, I had to run through large swaths of terrain during my last 17 miler. Weather, people and conditions forced me onto bumpy grass and dirt for a good portion of it. Not only have I not forgotten how, but I still need and utilize those abilities today.

I’m glad I got this book, and there’s useful material in here, even if it turns out I already have some of this knowledge. Sometimes it’s cool (and certainly not impossible) to learn that what you innately knew isn’t foreign to others.

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Feb 02 2019
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Running

Tip: Your first step has already been taken

I’ve talked before about how effective running steps push back rather than reach forward.

From my view, over-striding is to run by reaching forward with your front leg and having it pull you forward, instead of propelling your body by landing the front leg directly under your hips and pushing back. Whether or not your foot lands in front of your body is secondary to using your leg to reach instead of letting it land naturally beneath you.

Reaching your leg forward and pulling your body towards it once it lands is of course inefficient: It doesn’t allow you to fully utilize the power of your glutes, and forces your quads, hams, calves, etc. to do a lot more work that they’re designed for to keep you running. It also forces your hips and core to do a lot more work because your balance constantly shifts due to what’s essentially a bounding lunge posing as a running motion.

One of the reasons this is hard to internalize for many is because most think of the first step being the foot that reaches forward from where you stand or walk.

In reality, your first step is already on the ground. Since effective running form pushes back rather than reaches forward, your run begins when you push off from one foot on the ground to move your body forward.

The foot that first moves forward is actually the second step. And of course that second step should comfortably touch the ground and push back to propel you forward… rather than reach forward.

Start your run with this thought process, and you are well on your way to running comfortably and effectively.

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Dec 10 2018
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Running, Training

The Best Running Technique for Speed

So you want to run fast? Can’t blame you. We all do. I’ve talked about this before but I’ll make a point of it again:

The mistake most people make when they try to run faster than usual, such as in speedwork and in races, is to a) run physically harder, as in put forth more effort, and b) to reach farther with their steps and try to cover more ground with each step.

All the above serves to do is tire you out more quickly, and while this may be great for sprinters who need only maintain this effort for a few seconds… this is not a good way to run a race farther than, say, 400 meters. And pretty much every race you pay to run is a lot farther than 400 meters.

What you want is to maintain efficiency, while repeating your most efficient running motion faster than usual.

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Dec 01 2018
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Running, Training

Three Valuable Tips for Beginning Runners

1. You should run as slow as you can

You absolutely need to run slow. Slower than you think. Run as slow as you need to in order to keep running. As a newcomer to running, you will struggle to run for any amount of distance, and chances are likely you will quit early unless you first focus on running far as slowly as you can get away with.

A parallel: Competitive walking has a rigid set of rules that constitute what exactly constitutes a walk, and it’s a good guide for the minimum of what you need to do for your movement to qualify as a run.

A key point in race walking is that your back foot must be on the ground until your front foot plants on the ground.

Conversely, if your back foot comes up before your front foot impacts the ground, then you are technically running. See how slowly you can get away with safely doing this, and you may be surprised how slowly you are allowed to run.

2. Take each step as soft and easy as you can

Another key reason you want to run slow is to make it easier for you to run without having to hit the ground hard.

A telltale sign that a runner is outrunning his/her normal capabilities is that their feet hit the ground hard and loud. This isn’t just aesthetically displeasing, but it’s not healthy.

You’re jarring your joints, muscles and ligaments all the way up the chain from your feet up into your core, and risking long term injury. In fact, this is largely where common runner ailments like shin splints and IT band pain come from. You basically just stress those parts of your body until they hurt.

In dance and some theatre circles, performers are taught how to step as softly as they can. There’s usually no real method taught for this, but performers often work at it until they develop the proprioception, the locus of control, to step softly.

I guess it incidentally helped that I studied theatre and dance before becoming a serious runner, as learning this inadvertently, eventually helped me develop better running form.

But you don’t need to dance or do theatre to learn to run soft and easy. Stand up. Find some open space. Take a step forward as softly as you can. Take another step forward as softly as you can. Repeat. Take your time and relax while repeating this. You may find that your body naturally moves and adjusts with you. Eventually your body just knows how to move to comfortably make it work. It also probably feels silly to do, but work with it.

Now try to do it quickly, but stay as relaxed as possible. Do it consistently and quickly enough, and all of a sudden you’re running that way. It may not be fast or intense, but it works.

The home run trot I previously advocated is basically just this. It’s exactly what baseball players are doing. They’re just running as easy and comfortable as possible. Their feet are definitely not slamming into the ground.

3. Eat something with protein within an hour after every run

Recovery is something even experienced runners aren’t great at doing. Most don’t think at all about taking in nutrition within two hours of running, or realize that the half hour after running is a valuable window for refueling the body.

While carbohydrates may be valuable for glycogen restoration, what you do need for sure is protein. You just did a bit of damage to your muscles, and they need protein to rebuild. Consume at least 15-30g of protein.

I’m not saying you should pig out. Just eat a protein bar, some nuts or seeds, or drink a glass of milk, if nothing else. If you are in fact planning to eat a meal like breakfast or dinner right after running, great. Mission accomplished.

I can get into all the science as to why processed junk doesn’t help you as much as whole food, but in a nutshell you’re better off eating something healthy. If you’re in a bind and options are limited, then eat what you must. But given the option, try to eat whole foods in as close to their natural form as you can.

How well you bounce back between workouts is largely a function of how you recover. What you eat or drink soon after the run matters.

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