The practice of natural.., p.51
The Practice of Natural Movement, page 51
Notice the following things:
• One leg is bent and elevated.
• The other leg is supporting the whole body, with the knee bent—but not in an exaggerated way—and the ankle bent to ensure the whole-body lean.
• The head, neck, shoulders, back, hips, and supporting foot are aligned. This is a whole-body lean. The angle of the body’s forward lean remains consistent. The head stays horizontally level or very close to it.
• The shoulders are relaxed. The elbows are bent at about 90 degrees. The arms are close to the ribcage and move slightly straight ahead and back at that speed.
• The rear foot is pulled up underneath the hip. Because the speed doesn’t change in this sequence, the position of the legs stays the same regardless of which side is supporting the body. The center of gravity is horizontally ahead of the base of support: the back foot. As the center of gravity keeps shifting forward, there is a quick change of support with the front foot going down and the back leg being pulled up swiftly. Between the moment the front foot reaches the ground and the moment the back leg reaches the front, the body is airborne and traveling forward.
• Though you can’t see it in the photos, the positional sequence of the foot upon landing is lateral forefoot-forefoot-heel, then forefoot again as the supporting foot is pulled up (otherwise called the push-off).
• While Natural Movement techniques rely on position/breathing, sequence/timing, and tension/relaxation, we could simplify the pillars of running as follows:
• Position/breathing
• Cadence
• Relaxation
Practicing Inefficiencies
Practicing running inefficiencies is, in my experience, one of the most potent ways to fix ingrained habits and improve form and efficiency. Let me explain. While you are trying to run with efficient form, you’re probably dealing with some ingrained inefficiencies that keep showing up as if they’re on auto-pilot—because they are. You can easily find yourself overdrilling, overthinking, getting tense, becoming frustrated, and not getting where you want.
Addressing and tackling your inefficiencies one at a time is a great strategy because it allows you to first remove from your form what you shouldn’t be doing. There are many more “don’ts” than “dos.” When you can identify, as you run, what you tend to do constantly or intermittently that is counterproductive or superfluous, then you can start avoiding and removing those inefficiencies from your automatic running pattern. By tackling one inefficiency at a time, you’re steadily “purifying” your form more effectively than if you try to achieve the “perfect” form at once.
Now, it can be quite tricky to perceive patterns that, despite being inefficient, have been ingrained in your movement memory for so long that they feel natural and go unnoticed. Reading about inefficiencies or having someone point them out will not fix the issue. You need to experience the problem and get sensory feedback that is strong and convincing enough for you to acknowledge it as an issue and be willing to address it.
Look at the diverse, common faults in the photos. You might go to a local park to observe casual runners, and you’ll spot similar patterns. You’ll even spot some runners who display several faults, such as running with long, jumping strides; landing on the heels; using exaggerated arm movements; and shifting their heads forward as if they want to look as athletic they can. Another runner could be running with short, slow strides; landing on the midfoot; bending at the hip with almost no flexion at the knees; rounding the back and hunching the shoulders; wobbling the head side to side; and using zero movement in their arms. Others pull their knees to the front and heels to the back or swing their arms as high as they can as if they’re sprinting, even when they’re just jogging. Others display a healthy forefoot-heel-forefoot landing pattern, but they run with their torsos leaning back. The possible combinations of inefficient running form are countless. If you didn’t know, you could think that everyone’s running form is fine and just a matter of personal style.
However, you want to do more than look at inefficiencies. You need to practice each of them to consciously experience how counterproductive and unnecessary each of these inefficiencies feel. By practicing the inefficiencies, you will experientially realize that they are indeed issues. Practicing inefficiencies is especially effective for helping you become aware of inefficiencies you didn’t know you have.
I have ordered inefficiencies in the following list from the bottom of the body up—starting in the feet and legs, moving through the hips, and going all the way to the torso, arms, neck, and head. What happens in the feet, legs, and hips is the most important. You want to fix those issues before you address lower-priority issues. If your upper body is straight and relaxed but your hips, legs, and feet are doing a messy job, you’re in more trouble than if the situation is the other way around.
Practice each of these inefficiencies, one at a time, for about 30 seconds, or until you really can’t stand it anymore. Exaggerate them to the point that they look and feel either uncomfortable or plain absurd. If they feel that way when exaggerated, then even a “lighter,” less pronounced or noticeable version of the issues can’t really be a good thing, right?
Remember that any of the faults I’ve shown has the potential to be an actual, necessary adaptation to environmental or situational circumstances. The more complex the context becomes, the more likely that your “neutral” form will undergo a variety of positional modifications. Such changes are not only possible; they are mandatory to preserve efficiency. Heel striking becomes a good thing when going downhill, leaning backward becomes a good thing if you run beneath low tree branches, and so on. Clearly, this wouldn’t be a fault; it’s an adaptable motion. However, in the absence of necessity, any disturbance to a neutral form is an inefficiency. It’s a good idea to film yourself running and play the footage in slow motion, so you can get visual feedback of your running form and be able to realize inefficiencies you normally can’t see that you have.
TECHNIQUE TIP
Make sure to practice the neutral form in between experimenting with each inefficiency, so that you return to a form that feels good, relaxing, and efficient.
1 Heel striking: This makes landing hard on your whole body, and it slows you down.
2 Knees pulled way too high in relation to a slow pace: The same can be true of the heels being pulled up way too high toward the rear at a slow pace. Sometimes both your knees and heels are raised high, which looks like you’re riding a bicycle. This unnecessary movement of the leg wastes energy.
3 A form of leg pushing run with no lean, midfoot landing, almost non-existent airborne moment: While this style does minimize impact and makes running feel softer, this is closer to wide-step walking than running, and it fully relies on pushing off the quadriceps. Because you’re keeping your feet low and close to the ground, you’re not using your hamstrings to pull your heels up toward your rear, so the effort of bringing your leg forward is entirely left to your hip flexor muscles. This style is also slow, and you can’t go fast with this technique if needed.
4 Stiff legs, lack of flexion at the knees: Knees are designed to bend upon landing to enable leg muscles to absorb impact and prevent a shock wave to stress your knees, hips, and back at every step. Preventing your knees from flexing forces your feet to work more than they should to absorb some of the impact if you land on the forefoot first and to keep pushing forward. Not bending your knees enough leaves all the effort to your feet, ankles, and calves, which stresses these areas more than necessary.
5 Striding out: Running with big, long strides forces you to push hard on your leg muscles to propel yourself far and to extend your lead leg far (making the back leg trail behind). This forces you to land on your heel, which increases the impact. The time it takes for your center of gravity to move forward so it’s vertically aligned with your supporting foot is increased, which means the supporting foot must stay grounded longer. It absorbs the impact over a longer time, losing most of its ability to store and transfer elastic energy. It looks and feels as if you are “sitting” back on a single leg every time you land. The supporting leg has no other choice but to push forward with force again; rather than maintaining momentum, you basically re-create it with each step. This is not only extremely energy-consuming but it slows you down. Revert to much shorter and quicker steps any time you find yourself striding out.
6 Striding out with extended leg and ankle: This is another unconscious strategy aimed at avoiding a forward lean and maintaining a vertical, or even leaning-backward, torso as you attempt to step relatively softly. This style relies mostly on your hip flexor muscles to swing the leg forward without benefiting from the forward momentum from leg flexion. Also, extending the ankle early with the forefoot that is pointing forward all the way from the back to the front creates unnecessary tension at the ankle.
7 Bending at the hip, trunk leaning forward: You think that you are leaning forward and indeed you are, except that you are folding yourself in two or bending under a heavy load on your shoulders. This position in running stresses your lower back and lessens your ability to generate forward momentum because of gravity.
8 Trunk leaning backward: This style shifts your center of gravity behind your base of support. Although this backward lean would be great if you were running backward, in this case it prevents you from taking advantage of the forward pull of gravity, which increases your energy consumption, slows you down tremendously, and prevents you from going fast when needed.
9 Exaggerated hip and trunk rotation: This style makes your torso twist and your trailing leg rotate internally. The rotation can be mostly generated by your trunk or hips. Rotational motion of your hips is necessary in running, but it’s limited and doesn’t generate positional disturbance.
10 Trunk leaning/swaying from side to side: This upper-body motion wants to pull you sideways. On top of using energy necessary to stabilize your body, it diverts your kinetic motion from where it needs to be directed, which is forward.
11 Arms are actively swung sideways across the body: Your arms should move forward and back similarly to your legs. When your lead leg moves forward, your opposing arm should move forward as well (to counterbalance the action of your leg). Your arms shouldn’t move perpendicularly or at a pronounced angle.
12 Active arms: Arms are intentionally swung with great amplitude despite running slowly. How much your arms swing is balanced with your speed; it’s not an independent motion. Ample arm swinging can be momentarily used to assist acceleration as you run uphill; otherwise it’s a waste of energy.
13 Overly relaxed arms: Your arms are supposed to be sufficiently relaxed to enable a natural motion that counterbalances the movement of your legs, but your arms shouldn’t be dead weight. In this photo, it’s good that the shoulders are relaxed, but you need just enough tension in the biceps to keep your forearms up to the front just above hip level.
14 Tense arms and hands: The arms remain in a set position. This is unnecessary tension.
15 Tense, stiff upper body (neck, shoulders, arms, fists): This is unnecessary tension.
16 Hunched shoulders, flexed upper back: This is unnecessary tension.
17 Shrugged shoulders: This is unnecessary tension.
18 Head tilted down: When you have unnecessary tension in the neck, you end up with a rounded upper back, and your line of vision is restricted to the ground.
19 Head tilted back: This is unnecessary tension.
20 Head thrust forward (“head-chasing”): This is unnecessary tension.
The preceding list covers the most common inefficiencies. The following are some other inefficiencies:
• Tiptoeing. If you don’t let your heel gently tap the ground after you’ve landed on your forefoot, you’re not using elastic energy because the range of motion in your ankles and the stretch in your calf muscles is limited, preventing your feet from “loading up” as they contact the ground. You are instead forcing your feet, Achilles tendons, and calves to maintain constant tension. You should tiptoe only when necessary. For instance, in certain contexts tiptoeing could help you improve frictional force and stability for a very short distance as you forcefully accelerate from a Foot-Hand Crawl to sprinting.
• Running with splayed feet.
• Wobbling your head.
• Swinging a single arm outwardly, leaning to a single side, or any imbalance and lack of symmetry (caused by habit or compensation for a recent or old injury).
Cadence Versus Speed
Are you running yet? Yes, you are! The five fundamentals of improving your efficiency were using a slight forward whole-body lean, emphasizing a pulling leg motion, landing on the ball of your feet first, keeping a rather short stride and a high cadence. If you’re not at all a runner to begin with, and you normally don’t enjoy running because it feels hard on your legs and body, you should feel liberated that this new running pattern feels so light and easy.
You might be tempted to quickly try to run faster, especially if you’re are a runner already. The problem is that greater speed might have you immediately revert to inefficient habits. So, we need to talk about running faster (but not sprinting) while maintaining the same form and pattern you’ve just established.
First, though, I want to explain high cadence and why it matters for running efficiency. In running, cadence (also called rhythm, tempo, or turnover) is the frequency at which you move your legs to stride and step, regardless of your running speed. Your running speed is the distance you cover relative to time, regardless of how many leg movements (strides or steps) you perform. So, cadence has to do with the number of times (the rate or frequency) at which your feet hit the ground within a set amount of time. Just like your pulse or heart rate is the number of times your heart beats per minute, cadence is evaluated as the number of times per minute you step. Therefore, you can cover the same distance by running relatively slowly at a high cadence with short strides or running relatively quickly at a low cadence with long strides. You also can run quickly at a high cadence or run slowly at a slow cadence—and anything in between.
A high cadence doesn’t necessarily imply that you’re running fast if you keep your forward lean very slight and your strides short. Do you want proof? Think about the high cadence drill (drill 3, here). You were able to do very short, quick steps (180 per minute) while staying on the spot as long as you kept your center of gravity vertically aligned with your feet and avoided any forward whole-body lean. Clearly you can independently control your running cadence and your running speed.
Typically, an unskilled runner who’s jogging displays a low stride rate—or, if you prefer, a low cadence—of about 130 to 140 steps per minute without a significant increase of cadence when they run faster. Instead of mostly increasing cadence, unskilled runners accelerate by increasing stride length with wider steps, which makes it challenging to increase cadence. The problem is that running with large steps demands much more energy. With wider strides, you must first push hard off your leg to make the opposite foot land way ahead of your center of gravity. This usually results in your body moving not just horizontally but also overly vertically in an up-and-down fashion that resembles the elliptical airborne trajectory that’s typical of jumping. I’m not saying that there’s no vertical propulsion in running, but it should be limited. When you add significant vertical momentum to your movement, you add more airborne time, which is a reason why you paradoxically might go slower even when you’re trying to go faster. Also, the front leg, which is landing from a greater elevation than necessary, must absorb the heavier impact, usually after the heel lands first with a hard landing. You must wait for the rest of your body and center of gravity to move forward before you can push off your leg again. Meanwhile, your foot spends a significantly longer time on the ground supporting your body weight, and all muscle elasticity normally stored upon landing dissipates long before it can be transferred to the next step. The heel-first landing pattern, although it occasionally can be sustained depending on context, has a braking effect on your landing, with greater impact forces, increased ground time, and reduced elastic energy storage, which participates in slowing you down and tiring you early.
In a nutshell, you waste a lot of precious energy in the process. On top of consuming much more energy than needed, this pattern creates unnecessary levels of stress on your joints—your knees especially—and supports a much greater risk of pain during or after running sessions.
Conversely, short and rapid strides or high cadence keep you “elastic” at a much lower cost, with your feet landing right under your center of gravity and your supporting leg being able to immediately transfer a lot of stored elastic energy toward the next step. Both the time your body spends airborne and your feet spend grounded (which is as little as one-tenth of a second when you’re running really fast) gets much shorter. It’s much less tiring to cover a long distance with short, quick steps than to cover the same distance with long, slow steps. This difference in energy-consumption is something that you have already somewhat experienced with the leg-pushing and leg-pulling drills that you performed on the spot.
Is There a Magic Number?
So, what cadence is best, and for what speed? It’s often said that the best running cadence is 180 steps per minute regardless of speed. That’s about three steps per second, which might sound like a lot, but leg movement in running is faster than you think when you make sure to keep your stride short. At that cadence, you can fully, consistently benefit from both muscle-tendon elasticity in your feet and legs and ground reaction forces. Running with a low cadence of about 130 to 150 steps per minute is a sign of an unskilled runner who is striding out all the time.
