Real Life Runners with Angie and Kevin Brown

363: How Running Form Helps You Become A More Efficient Runner (Part 2)

• Angie Brown

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Episode 363 of the Real Life Runners Podcast delves into Part 2 of becoming a more efficient runner, focusing on running form. We emphasize the importance of proper running posture, optimal cadence, and correct arm swing. We discuss common mistakes like running too upright or hunched over, overstriding, and excessive arm cross-over, offering practical tips on how to correct these issues. The episode underscores the need for strength and mobility work to support running form improvements.a


00:54 The Importance of Running Form

03:29 Running Economy and Efficiency

06:28 Common Posture Mistakes

13:12 Practical Tips for Improving Posture

23:04 Understanding Overstriding

25:42 Introduction to Cadence

26:13 Calculating Your Cadence

27:20 Improving Running Efficiency

28:45 Avoiding Common Cadence Mistakes

38:11 The Importance of Arm Swing

47:34 Proper Arm Swing Techniques


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Angie:

This is the Real Life Runners Podcast, episode number 363. How to become a more efficient runner, part two, all about running form. What's up, runners? Welcome to the show today. If you missed last week's episode, I highly suggest you go back and check that out. Because if you saw the title of this episode and you're like, Oh, I want to learn about running form. Go back and check out last week first. That gives you more of the overview about how to become a more efficient runner. In which running form is just one piece of the puzzle. Okay, a lot of times people try to go right to, To Fixing their running form because they, oftentimes it's because they see a race photo of themselves and they don't like what it looks like or some sort of video or something, and they want to fix their running form. But before you just jump into the world of running form and trying to fix something that might not be broken, go back and listen to episode one, um, last week, episode number 362, that's part one. And then come back to this one. All right, we'll, we'll talk all about running form today. We're going to talk about what you need to be thinking about, what you might want to think about and what you don't really need to think about very much at all, um, in today's episode, because there's a lot of people that want to fix their running form and like I said, if it ain't fixed a lot of, if it ain't, if it ain't broken, a lot of the times you don't need to worry about fixing it, but there are ways that you can become more efficient and waste less energy, and that's really what we're going to focus on today.

Kevin:

Yes, and it's the whole idea of like improving the overall efficiency of your training was kind of where we're at yesterday and one component last week yesterday It's all timeline. It's in the world of podcast Yeah, so last week we're the overall training efficiency and part of that is well how much time should I really? Devote to my running form today We're talking all about running form of if you if you feel like it is Worthwhile to devote some time to it and it might be it might be worthwhile to spend some time It might not be worth it to spend hours and hours working on your running form week after week But we've got some highlights on running form What to do with your running form, different areas to focus on. If you've decided that that is something that you would like to work on and optimize.

Angie:

Okay. So how do you decide, first of all, if running form is even something that you want to run on?

Kevin:

No, you had that one already. Bad race photo.

Angie:

Bad race photo. That's the only, that's the, that's the reason. Well, so here's kind of the idea when it comes to running form. And there's a lot of people out there, especially if you are on social media, Instagram, all the YouTube videos that will teach you how to optimize your running form, how to quote unquote fix your running form. But if you really look at lots of different videos, if you've ever watched a marathon or even when you look at the elite runners, there is, there are differences. From one form to the next. A lot of them do look very similar. And I think it's so beautiful when you watch the elite runners and they all send, like, tend to get into that rhythm with each other,

Kevin:

which

Angie:

is super cool. But there are individual differences. And I know that as a physical therapist, I just naturally look at people's gait. I look at the way that people run and there are some professional runners out there that I am. Surprised that they are not currently injured because of the way that their running form looks, but it's like it works for them I guess for a lot of times but When you improve your running form basically what we have what happens is We're looking at efficiency here, how to become a more efficient runner. So if you improve your running form, you can, in theory, use less energy to run at the same pace. So when you improve your economy and your efficiency, you're using less energy, which means that you have more energy to run faster and longer.

Kevin:

Right. So there's two terms to get thrown around, and essentially they're basically the same thing. One of them is to improve your running economy, which basically means you're using less oxygen to run at a fixed pace. So if you're running like a 10 minute mile and you improve your running economy, you're still running at a 10 minute mile, but you're using less oxygen. And that means that you're burning less fuel. And the other side is running efficiency, which means you, you, Maintain how much energy you're burning through, but you're able to go faster at that same burn rate, essentially. They are kind of overlapping terms, and they get used very much interchangeably. Technically, they're different, but for all, all purposes on our podcast, we're gonna use them interchangeably. And one of the mistakes that I've seen and have fallen into myself is chasing after a certain metric on your watch, VO2 max for instance, that you can get really fixated on that number and it turns out that that number is not always as easily adjustable as improving your running economy. After you've trained for a little while, you've kind of, well, You've maxed out your VO two max, but you're running economy and efficiency can continue to improve. So you can keep getting faster and faster. Even though your watch says you're essentially staying at the same fitness level because your watch is going to dictate off of whatever number they find easy to read. And we've been able to figure out how to record a VO two max for. Years and now we're trying to be able to shorthand it and read it off of a watch So it's it's a nice number that you can look at but it's not necessarily The number that we all want to chase even though it's it's recorded on several watches

Angie:

Yeah And if we're really kind of getting down to it Don't you just want to feel better when you're running and that's what But running more effectively and more efficiently will help you to do it because when you're running at the same pace, it doesn't feel as hard. So like the, whatever pace you're normally running at right now, you can assign an effort level to that. So on a scale of one to 10, how hard does that effort feel to you? If you're improving your running efficiency, that same pace should feel easier as you become a more efficient runner because your body is using oxygen more effectively. It's using fuel more effectively. It's just there's less wear and tear on your muscles. There's a whole host of benefits to improving your efficiency as a runner. And that's what we want to really dive into today, specifically looking at running form. So there's three main things that we want to look at today. When it comes to running form. And the first one is your running posture. Okay. Now this is where I see a host of differences between runners. And there's two main mistakes that we often see when it comes to posture. One, you're running too upright and number two, you're running too hunched over. And there's a lot of nuance and there's a lot of other little things that we can look at when it comes to running posture. But ultimately when you. Improve your posture. It's going to help reduce wasted energy and, um, so example, all right, let me just kind of get into it here. So when you run and we started to get into this last week, basically you're jumping from one leg to the other. So in basically a fraction of a second, considering you take approximately 160 to 180 steps per minute, which we'll get more into in part three and cadence when we talk, or actually part two, when we talk about cadence, but basically you're. One leg is hitting the ground about 80 to 90 times per minute. That's a lot. So that means in a fraction of a second, your body has to not only stabilize itself, but also generate power to push you forward. And so if it's. Expending a lot of energy trying to figure out which muscles to turn on just to hold you upright so that you don't fall over, then you're, you're wasting energy that you could be using to propel yourself forward both faster and longer. So improving your posture is not only going to help with your speed and your endurance, but it's also going to help running feel a lot better. So if you are someone that has. back pain, hip pain, neck pain, knee pain, any sort of pain in the body, improving your posture, specifically if you have pain like within the trunk, like in your, in your back, upper back or lower back and really working and being focused on your posture is going to help a lot with this.

Kevin:

All right. So, um, I again, I don't want to harp on this thing, but I do think that sometimes the pictures that you get out of yourself out of races, don't look at what your face looks like. And sometimes you're like, Oh, I look like I'm struggling so much in that. And like, okay, but that's mile 20 of a marathon. Of course you were struggling in that one. But there have been some race photos that I've seen of myself where I'm like, huh, that's not the form that I thought that I had. Or sometimes if like you've taken a video of me that you wanted to use for something like that is not what I thought my running form looked like. And one of the things that I was falling trap to is I was standing too upright and my issue, I'm quite convinced, and this is not even coming right from Angie. You're getting it from, from my perspective is I was adjusting my form to make up for muscle weaknesses. Yeah. So I was running with this upright form because by almost by standing super upright, it reduced the pain from my weak hips and area because of the hernia that I was dealing with for the last several years. So it kept getting, if you look over the past few years of my running photos, I literally just kept getting more and more upright until towards the end of races. I was almost leaning backwards because I couldn't lean forward. It was. It was painful and uncomfortable because of too much weakness and, and, uh, all sorts of muscle issues going on.

Angie:

Yeah. And so that is definitely one thing that happens is we just naturally make these compensations based on muscle weakness or muscle restriction or tightness. It's just one of the amazing and magical things about our body. Like I think that a lot of people want to look at it and say, Oh my gosh, I can't believe I did this to myself, but it's your body. Trying to fix itself. That's what's actually happening here. Your body's like, I'm weak here. So I need to compensate for that by kind of adjusting how upright I am or leaning over to the side a little bit, or changing my arm swing a little bit. Like your body just naturally makes all of these adjustments without you even having to think about it, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. So let's just start off by honoring our body instead of like, before we jump in Start being really critical with ourselves.

Kevin:

Yeah, you point out the one like you'll see pictures of some people and they're like, I don't know why I'm leaning over to the left. It's like, well, because you were developing a side stitch and your body naturally just leaned into it to try to reduce the pressure and pain on that side. That was your body. Just naturally making this thing. You may have consciously thought about it, but even before that, your body was already fixing your form. Yeah. To try to reduce the pain as much as possible. So my body just did that. And I developed this very upright form for years.

Angie:

Right. And the issue with that is that it reduces your efficiency. It reduces how effectively you're able to generate force and absorb force as well. So I'm going to use your example since you already threw it out there. If you stand too upright, even to the point where you said you were almost leaning back, when you're leaning back like that, you're not getting enough hip extension because you're compensating by. Tilting your pelvis forward a lot of times, right? Because a lot of times when we. Try to adjust, make any sort of adjustments with our posture. We tend to bend at our hips instead of our ankles. The ideal thing that we want to do is we want to lean forward at our ankles. But most of us, when we're trying to think about posture, we think about, should, where, We are in relation to our hips. So if Kevin is leaning backwards, that means his pelvis, like the front of his hips, we're pushing forward, which then put his body, like his hip flexors and his hip extensors at a disadvantage. And so he probably wasn't getting full hip extension, which is like the kickback, um, part of, of running, which means he wasn't pushing off effectively. And so it just kind of, it's one of those things that, um, trickles down that we often don't necessarily think, Oh, well, it's, my posture is extremely important for running, but when based on your posture, your posture helps to kind of. Tell what muscles and not, not when to activate, but it does definitely affect muscle activation. Your, your muscles are still working, right? There's a lot of, um, you know, I hesitate to say muscle activation because people think like, Oh no, you have to activate your glutes before you go on your run. Your glutes are active. Otherwise you would be falling over, right? Like if you were, if you had inactive glutes, you would literally not be able to run and you are, would fall over onto the ground, but there is a difference in firing pattern and there is a difference in how much range of motion is available to you, how powerful that, um, each stride can be. So. And not really activating your muscles, but really the effectiveness of each muscle contraction,

Kevin:

which really goes to efficiency. If you're firing off your muscles, that's going to use energy. And if you're firing them off in an inefficient manner, if you're not actually getting, you know, you're, you're pushing off the ground, you're propelling yourself forward, but it's not moving you in the correct direction. Inefficient. You're literally wasting it.

Angie:

You're moving in the right direction. If

Kevin:

you're standing too far upright, you're going to end up bouncing more than you're supposed to run.

Angie:

Okay. So you're saying you're going up instead of forward. That's

Kevin:

what I'm saying is too much up and too little forward. Okay.

Angie:

I mean, yes, that's true.

Kevin:

And, but I like that we're opening with posture as one of the opening things, because you pointed out that if I stand too, too upright, one of the things that I'm not going to get is good kickback. And one of the cues that you see so much online, so many coaches do this is, is trained to like, Rip through the ground. If I have this super upright posture and you give me a running cue of rip through the ground, it's not going to suddenly make me lean forward. I'm just going to be standing super upright, but now awkwardly tearing through the grounds. It it's, I'm going to end up tripping. Is what's going to happen because I'm not getting enough knee drive. So by ripping through the ground with one foot, I'm just going to suddenly bend excessively at the waist and end up probably tripping over any roots and even slight bumps in a sidewalk because that cue would not work for what was wrong with my particular issue.

Angie:

Right. So what do we mean when we say you're too upright? So essentially when you're standing, like if you feel yourself just standing before you're even running, think about where your weight is on your feet. Are you someone that tends to put more weight on the front of your foot, like on the ball of your foot? Do you place more weight through your heels? Do you place more weight through your midfoot? Everybody's a little bit different here, you know, are you someone that when you stand you lock your knees out? Do you tend to kind of lean over to one side versus the other like we all have different habitual patterns of standing and that? Matters in your running as well because when you have a habitual pattern So one great example that I love to use because I'm a woman and I've had two babies is when I had my kids And especially when they were little I used to hold them on one hip and by doing that I was constantly putting more weight on one side because I, I know I favored one side over the other. I think I had them on my left side because I'm right handed so then I could do things with my right hand while holding them on my left, which means I was constantly kind of leaning the left hip out to the side, which then pushed my shoulders to the right to kind of compensate for that, which put more weight on one side of the hip and like, it just throws everything off. So. So if you're in a place where you can stand up, if you're listening to this podcast, or maybe you're at a red light in the middle of your run, I want you to stand and just think about where your weight is when you're standing. Okay. That's number one. Number two, when you're running, where is your weight placed? So if you are running, think about that as well. You know, are you landing more on your, on the back of your foot, the middle of your foot, the front of your foot? Okay. We're not going to talk about heel strike, um, strike patterns right now, but just in general, where is your weight? Like where do you kind of feel your weight? And What you want to do. All right, so first notice where you are and then ideally what you want is more of your weight towards the front of your foot. Okay, you want your weight over your toes, not above your heels. Now, when I say that, that does not mean that you need to be a forefoot at all. Or a forefoot striker. You don't need to land with all of your weight on the front of your foot. That's not what I'm saying. Okay. You can still land on your heel. You can still land on your midfoot and still have your weight, the center of mass, the center of gravity moving forward over your toes versus coming back. And the problem is when you're too upright, it's almost like your weight's going in the wrong direction. You want your weight to be moving forward because that's the way that we're running. Is that making sense?

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean, the way that this was taught to me decades ago by a really esteemed coach was to stand upright. He had the whole group of us runners stand in front of him, he goes, stand upright and now lean forward and still until you start feeling your toes gripping the ground. And then right before you're about to fall. Right before you feel like you have to take a step forward that is your appropriate running posture And we're like, well, I feel like I'm about to fall He goes yes, and if you feel like you're about to fall you're going to take the next step and that's running Here's you should Perpetually feel like you're going to take the next step because if you don't feel like you're almost in that move of falling over if You're upright it becomes really easy to be like alright now I'm gonna slow down and walk for a little bit if you feel like you're about to fall you have to keep taking that Next step it is in fact Proper running posture. So if you're running and you look down, you should basically be looking at the ground in front of you rather than look down and be able to see your feet because you're, you should have this forward lean. But as, as Angie pointed out earlier, it's a forward lean from the ankles.

Angie:

Not the hips.

Kevin:

Yeah. Not from the hips. Not

Angie:

from the hips for sure. And the, like one way I like to think about this is running downhill. Like if you've ever run downhill and you feel Kind of on the edge of being out of control. That's what we're looking for here, but also like running downhill. A lot of people, when they're going downhill, the proper way to run downhill is actually to lean forward. Away from the hill. Um, but most people, when they feel out of control, they tend to lean back and this slows you down. It makes runner running way harder on your joints. Um, especially when you're running downhill and same thing, when you're just running on flat land as well, when you're too upright, you're actually using, you require more muscle activation and you're requiring more energy and you're putting more force through your joints versus just using more momentum. And that Potential and kinetic energy that are just naturally trying to drive you forward

Kevin:

I mean if you you if you lean forward from from the ankles literally gravity is pulling you forward So you're using the pull of the earth rather than having to create all that force yourself use Use the giant mass of the earth to help you run,

Angie:

right? And you obviously can't use just that but you might as well use it to your advantage. Okay, so that's If you're running too upright. The other thing that we often see is people that are running too hunched over. Now this can be hunched at the shoulders. Like, um, this especially happens in women since we tend to have bigger chests than men, especially if you are a woman that has a bigger chest than other women. A lot of times we kind of round our shoulders forward. We're getting into that more hunched posture and it's not just women anymore. It's really pretty much everyone because our society, we're so. Naturally hunched forward now when it comes to computers and, you know, all of the things that we do on a daily basis, like think about your daily activities, you're hunched over on the computer, probably unless you're very, very aware of your posture, you're doing dishes, you're folding laundry, like all of our things are going, moving us in that forward direction. So we really need to counteract that by helping to consciously bring our shoulders back because When we're in that hunched posture, basically what we're doing is we are overstretching the muscles on our upper back and we are tightening the muscles in our chest. And guess what else is in our chest? Our lungs. And so we obviously need our lungs to breathe and we want our lungs to be able to expand fully to get more air and more oxygen in so that we can then get oxygen to those working muscles. So if we are too hunched forward, We are not effectively breathing. We're not effectively getting oxygen in, which means we're going to fatigue much more quickly. We're also going to tire out those, um, muscles in our neck and our shoulder because those muscles are essentially like trying to pull you back into place. Our body constantly wants us to be in better alignment because it's what it is. Is good for us. And when we're not in good alignment, our body wants to get us there. So it tries to tighten the muscles to kind of pull you back in. So if you ever have any muscle spasms, muscle tightness, those kinds of things, it's often because those muscles are overstretched and weakened. Um, and your body's trying to compensate and pull it back into place.

Kevin:

Right. So this happens with like the kids on our cross tender team is you'll see them get like side stitches. Like I I'm having trouble breathing and I'm watching them run. I'm like, well, you're completely hunched forward. Both of your shoulders are like. Curled in like you're literally you look like you're trying to crawl into a shell and so they roll their shoulders back But they can only sustain it for like a couple minutes because it feels super uncomfortable and suddenly they're using Muscles across their chest they're using muscles in their back that have not been activated in that method before so they feel Kind of tired from doing this this new actual Standing upright pulling their shoulders back opening their chest up posture Which You know, while it should be more efficient, it is something that we have to practice on. But if you practice at it, you can drastically improve your running efficiency and this is going to have big long term gains for you. So, I'm not saying that you have to go out and fix your running form and have perfect form through the entire run on every run that you go out. That's going to drive you nuts. Okay. You're going to feel uncomfortable. You're going to feel tired all the time. But from time to time, if you notice that you're running with a hunched forward with your shoulders kind of rolled forward, just try to open your chest up and run for a few minutes with this open chest posture and see how it feels. And then if you kind of glide back into a little bit more lean forward and That's gonna be okay. It doesn't be perfect the entire time. Just notice that it's happening and then roll your shoulders back and open up your chest again, and it will become a more natural feel for you.

Angie:

Yeah, and the other thing that I want you to do is also practice when you're not running. Spend more time putting your shoulders back, really being aware of that, um, squeezing your shoulder blades together. Another thing I like is just lying on the floor like with your arms out to the side or even lying on a foam roller with the foam roller going. basically along your spine. A lot of people when they think about foam rollers, they think about it going perpendicular to the body and kind of rolling over the foam roller. But I like to often, especially when it comes to posture and breathing to lie with the foam roller down my spine, like so parallel where my spine is basically along the foam roller with my arms out to the side just to stretch my chest and kind of open up my chest more. Um, that's going to help me in my running and really also in just the rest of my life as well.

Kevin:

All right, so the next point, Angie and I have a little debate of which category this goes into. I think that it makes sense to stick this into posture, but it's going to be a nice transition to the next topic as well because it fits nicely into both of them. Right. All right. So the idea here is over striding, not necessarily landing on your heel, but simply landing with your foot way out in front of the body over striding.

Angie:

So let's back up a little bit because if you're a runner that has done any sort of research or listen to podcasts or read any books, especially if you've read, um, read the books in the early 2000 about barefoot running, that became really popular. There, there was, there's a lot of information out there about. And about where, like what part of your foot hits the ground first? It does your heel hit first as your midfoot, do you land on the forefoot? And basically what research has shown at the beginning, they thought they said, Oh, heel striking is bad. You don't want to heal heel strike that increases your risk of injury. And basically more recent research has shown it's not. What part of your foot hits first, it's where your foot lands in relation to your body. So that's what Kevin's talking about when it comes to over striding is, is your foot landing underneath your center of mass, which is what we're talking about earlier when we're talking, um, about your upright posture and like that leaning forward, you want your weight going forward. So your center of mass is essentially, if you can just imagine this imaginary dot right out in front of your belly button, that's what you're where your center of mass is. Especially when we're trying to run. Um, If your foot is landing under your body or under your center of mass, that's what you want. Okay, but a lot of people land with their foot out in front of them. And oftentimes this happens when you're trying to run faster. People try to take longer steps and they end up landing with their foot way out in front of them. which is putting a more jarring force on the body, and that can really increase your risk of injuries.

Kevin:

Yes, and it's just going to slow you down. Every time you land, you're literally breaking. Like, if you picture trying to stand there and run, and your foot is out in front of you, pushing hard down on the ground, especially if you imagine this with, Landing heel first, you actually look like you're about to sit down in a car and push on the brake because you are like, if you land with your foot extended in front of you and your heel touching the ground first, and don't get me wrong, I'm fine with landing heel first. It's just when it's way out in front of you, because I've seen people over stride and land on their toes because they were so ingrained that toes stride, like I have to land on my toes. They're doing it, but they were still landing with their foot super far out in front of them. It just looked like their knee was going to get blown out at any point in time.

Angie:

Yeah. So both are problematic. It doesn't matter what part of your foot hits first. If your foot's out in front of your

Kevin:

body, either way, you're slamming on the brakes with every single step. And that is not an efficient way to do it. We've, we live in South Florida. There are people that drive with their foot on the brake the entire time. It is not an efficient way to do it.

Angie:

Not efficient, which leads us into part two. Okay. So after you think about your posture, the second thing you might want to think about is your cadence and these things vary. I'm going to show you how they easily go together because when you increase your cadence, when you're taking shorter and quicker steps, oftentimes that can help to correct over striding. What, why might you think about adjusting your cadence? Number one, you don't want to adjust your cadence just because you heard that 180 steps per minute is the magic number. All right. That is not a good reason to adjust your cadence. If you assess your cadence and basically to assess your cadence, you just count how many steps you take every single minute. You can either do that by counting literally left, right, left, right. And counting the number of steps you could count just one foot. How many times does one foot hit the ground in the course of a minute and multiply by two? You could count how many times one foot hits the ground in 15 seconds, and then you multiply by eight, right? So there's lots of different ways to calculate your cadence or

Kevin:

good quick math on the fly. Thank

Angie:

you. Or you could just look at your watch, right? A lot of watches nowadays will give you a cadence. And even though it might not be. 100 percent accurate. You're probably going to be able to get a range there. The only thing I will say is that if you are looking at cadence on your watch or on your app, Um, if you are someone that does a run walk where you do like running intervals and then you take a walking break, it's going to average those out. So you want to make sure that you zoom in and just look at your, um, cadence when you're running. Okay. To, to determine your running cadence.

Kevin:

That is a good, good answer. When I was coming back off of surgery, my cadence was somewhere around like one 35 and I'm like, that doesn't seem right at all, but it made sense when it averaged out over the whole thing.

Angie:

Exactly. Exactly. So. If you're someone that's, you know, trying to take longer steps because you're trying to get faster if you're some or you're someone that takes really short steps and you end up shuffling, you might want to think about, um, changing your cadence. I often will tell people, Okay, we might want to do some cadence work if your cadence is below a hundred and sixty steps per minute I like to really shoot for a hundred somewhere between a hundred and sixty and two hundred steps per minute That's a really big range Which is why a lot of people say a hundred and eighty because it's right in the middle of that range and we can go Into where a hundred and eighty came from but it's really not that important. Essentially if you're over a hundred and sixty 60, you're, you're probably okay. Um, if you're under 160, you might want to increase your cadence a bit because that's going to help improve your efficiency. It's also going to, um, decrease your chance of over striding and get that foot more underneath your body with every step.

Kevin:

Yeah. And that's one of the other things is a lot of people. They will rapidly increase their cadence when they're going faster, but it's not necessarily the most efficient way to do it. If you can speed up, and your cadence will increase as you go faster. As you move closer to a sprint, you're definitely going to have quicker turnover, but if you're just moving from like, an easy pace to a moderate pace, you should not have a huge cadence. You should essentially be changing that by adjusting the length of your stride. Not suddenly over striding, but you're simply going to be taking bigger steps because you're covering more, more, uh, ground in the air between your steps.

Angie:

Right, and so this is one of the things that happens to a lot of people, especially when they learn about easy running or zoned running. To training is the big term that's out in the, in the litter, in the social media running world right now is like, you got to slow things down. You got to do zone two. And you guys know we're fan of easy runs. We talk about it all the time here on the podcast. It's getting a little overinflated right now. And people are getting, uh, not the full picture here. Um, but. When people try to slow down for the first time, they often do this by trying to slow down their cadence and they end up plodding along. And so that's really dangerous because that can increase your risk of injury. So this takes practice and it feels awkward at first, but you have to learn how to try to maintain the same cadence, but just do so at a slower speed. So. Kevin, how would you, like, What kind of tips would you have for people in order to do that?

Kevin:

All right. So the image that you should have as you do this is, is if you've ever, I mean, the Olympics are coming, so you can watch the horse competition. And one of the funniest events is the competition where the horses look like they're dancing. It's called dressage. It essentially looks like little prancing ponies. That is the appropriate image that you should be trying to go. And whoever you are, that's the image, whatever your pace, you want to embody prancing pony, just heading down the sidewalk, up the hill and down the mountains, but

Angie:

also leaning forward and not just standing straight upright. Like we were talking about before,

Kevin:

of course, a slightly leaning forward from the angles, prancing pony. I think I've, I think we've got this nailed. Exactly nailed

Angie:

it.

Kevin:

Yeah. I mean, everybody can perfectly get that image in their head, but The idea here is that you want to be light on your feet. Like if, if you can really strongly hear the thud of your feet, you're probably landing too hard and it's, it's plodding along. You're not optimizing yourself. So that's one thing to key in on.

Angie:

All right, so opposite of plodding along would be shuffling, and this is the other thing that we often see, um, that would be a good reason to work on cadence. So basically, if you're shuffling, you're spending too much time on the ground. When you run, the, the, basically the defining feature of running is that there is a point in the running gait where both feet are on the ground. off the ground. So you're essentially flying. And if you're shuffling, that usually doesn't happen. Usually you're taking such small steps and you're not getting enough lift in each of your steps so that when you're, let's just say your right foot is moving forward, your left foot is still on the ground the whole time and is still on the ground. Like the toes of your left foot are still on the ground when the right foot hits the ground. So there's never that float period of time. And this is basically increasing, greater friction and resistance, um, during your run. And you're also losing out on the benefit of the springiness of your muscles. So basically every time when you take a step, when you're running, it's not just your muscles that are working. We're all, we also want to tap into the springiness quality in our tendons. And we've talked about this in previous episodes. I'll have to try to go back and figure out, um, which ones we've talked about, but this is, um, You want to think of your tendons. So in this case, your Achilles tendon, like a spring. And when you compress a spring, it generates basically a pushback force. And when you're shuffling along, you're not taking advantage of that pushback force that naturally is in your tendons.

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean, I think this is really one of the best reasons to increase stride rate is if, if your cadence is faster, you can't be on the ground for that much time. More than what my cadence is. One of the things that, um, I've really enjoyed about the new features on my watch is it ballparks how long my foot is on the ground for. And you can really see the difference between going fast and going slow that, that you can The amount of time my foot spends on the ground is really small. If you're on the ground and shuffling along and not, like, getting good lift off of the ground, you lose that, that kickback from, literally every time your foot hits the ground, it should almost pop back off of the ground because the Achilles tendon, like a spring, you, you, uh, uh, Coil up the spring and then it releases and pops the foot back off the ground. So yeah, you need to use your muscles to drive it forward, but there's this built in boost of your tendon. As long as you hit the ground and pop back off fast enough. If like the opposite of this is like, if you're running in super, super soft sand, like you can't get a spring back off of this because you, you try and run on thin, Thick dry sand and there is no spring back off of it. You try and pop and the ground just kind of keeps pushing away Underneath you, you essentially are forced to shuffle off of this or you know, if you go back to say like one of my favorite movies and you've got Rocky training on the beach with Apollo, they have such ridiculous knee drive because there is no springback that the ground is giving them. And so now you're trying to like run down the street and you have this super powerful knee drive that's not a normal. running form. That's like just a pure sprint form. So you want this quick quick turnover so that you can get the spring back effect and shuffling is the opposite.

Angie:

Right. But I mean, when you're shuffling, you don't get that knee drive and powerful sprinting form either. Like you're just shuffling along and essentially like sliding your feet. And this is often common with people that have very high cadences because they just kind of shuffle their feet along. And with every single step, if you're just kind of sliding and not getting that spring back and not that push off from the ground, you're just increasing the amount of work that your body and your muscles have to do. It's you're not using the ground reaction force. You're not using the springiness of your tendons, and you're essentially like if you think about like sliding something along a surface, especially a surface like the road, it's not usually very smooth. There's friction there. That's gonna slow you down naturally. So this is one of the reasons why. Getting, uh, you know, working on your cadence and also working on that like pop in your step is also very important.

Kevin:

Yeah, I mean, to go along with shuffling, like really the opposite of shuffling is people who make these big, giant strides. They don't spend relative the amount of time on the cadence. That they're on the ground, they have this huge amount of time in the air. But you're also not moving faster when you're in, when you're extending float phase. Like the extreme example of this is someone doing the triple jump. They go sprinting down the runway ridiculously fast, and then they take two huge giant leaping strides. And all they do is get slower and slower with each one of these. That's why they need so much speed before they hit takeoff. Because when you're spending a huge amount of time in the air, you. You're not increasing your speed moving down the sidewalk. You're not even maintaining, you're losing speed up in the air. So shuffling, you're losing speed because you're just, the ground is slowing you down for friction and taking bounding strides down the sidewalk, you're losing speed because air resistance and you're not actually pushing off the ground very often.

Angie:

Yeah. I never understood the triple jump. It always looked like such an awkward event to me. Have you ever tried it?

Kevin:

Yeah. I am shockingly not amazing at it. Um, but no, I've

Angie:

never tried it. I mean, it's like, there's so much coordination involved in it, but it just looks so awkward to me.

Kevin:

I think it is. It's one of the coolest events when people get it right. When people do not get it right, it is super awkward to watch, but when done correctly, it's amazing.

Angie:

Yeah. So quite honestly, That these, this is the order also that I want you guys to understand that when I start working with somebody about running form or when someone asks me about running form, this is usually the order that I go in. Usually I have people become more aware of their posture first. Work on cadence second and then third the third aspect that we want to go over today is arm swing before we jump in Do you have anything else that you wanted to say about cadence? I think we covered Most of it kind of in summary as long as you're above 160 steps per minute You're probably okay If you want to work on your cadence for some reason because of you know The things that we've talked about here, you know Don't try to increase your cadence from like 150 to 180 immediately. Try to increase by about 10%. Um, and some of the ways that you can increase cadence would be using a metronome, which can be super annoying, but it's super effective the way that I did it. Um, when I. Decided to increase my cadence, which was a very good idea for me, was that I found songs around 175 to 180 beats per minute. And I ran to the songs and just was able to basically, um, get my foot down every single beat. Uh, it was very awkward, very. difficult at first. And if you are going to do this again, do not do this for the entire run. So I would do it for like one song and then take a break and go back to my regular running form and then go back and do maybe another song so that you're only doing it for a couple of minutes at a time.

Kevin:

Right. So when I did this, I would use Angie's playlist, which one was a great combination of music. That was not necessarily the songs that I would have chosen, but I also do not have the same natural, um, um, sense of rhythm that Angie has. So I can just play the whole playlist and it could all be at 180 beats per minute because I could tune in and out to what the beat was. I had to consciously pay attention to what the beat was and then sometimes put a metronome over the top of it. All right. So I think that pretty much covers cadence for us. So the next concept that we want to kind of start moving into here is So where do we want to start on arm swing?

Angie:

So the biggest mistake that we see people making with arm swing is arms crossing over the midline. Okay. So basically you're, when you run your arm or your fist is crossing over that mid, like if you were to draw a line down the center of your body, your arm, your fist is crossing over that line and kind of swinging across your chest. Um, I think that that is really the biggest mistake that most runners make when it comes to arm swing. The problem with this is that, During running our natural pattern in during walking as well, but more, uh, more so during running our arms counterbalance our legs. Okay. So when we run, uh, As our left foot goes forward, our right arm goes, rotates forward to counterbalance that. And it's actually kind of funny, um, I've had multiple people send me a reel on Instagram of this guy, this group of guys, trying to run with the same arm and same leg forward instead of trying to do the counterbalance. balance. It's hilarious. Um, maybe we'll have to try to reenact that video. It just seems kind of silly.

Kevin:

I tried to do it. I was, I was not good at all. So if you would like to film me attempting to do it, I'm sure it could be a blast for everybody.

Angie:

That sounds like a blasty blast right there. But yeah, so that's your, your natural running, uh, rhythm with arm swing and leg swing is that opposite arm, opposite leg. That is just what naturally happens. And so, If you are running faster, if you've ever noticed a sprinter, like watch the Olympics again, they're coming up this summer. We're super excited. But if you watch a marathon runner versus an Olympic sprinter sprinter, you will notice that number one, the arms move differently, right? Like when you're running a longer distance race, your arms are more relaxed. They don't move as much versus a sprinter has a lot more. arm swing because they're trying to propel themselves forward because again, your arms also help your legs start to run faster and to move faster. They are connected. And so if your arms are swinging across your midline, your legs have to figure out how to compensate for that. And so a lot of times we don't even realize all the damage that like arm swinging across the midline can do. Because basically, um, If, if you do this, you might be someone that's experiencing neck and upper back pain, hip and lower back pain, knee pain. There's all sorts of pain that can happen just from improper arm swing. So, I mean, obviously that's not the only thing that's going wrong. There's a, there's probably weakness and other issues at play here as well. But if you've been doing strength training, you've been working on mobility. This is a really important thing, especially if the arm swing is excessive, because if your arms are. swinging really violently across, across the front of your chest. Your hips are also like rotating and trying to stabilize yourself. And so you're putting more rotational force through your spine, through your hips, through your, your knees are probably crashing in a bit too. So there's a lot, um, that goes on down the chain that your arms can really help fix.

Kevin:

Yeah. I mean, that's really the thing is, It, it is an entire chain, so if you start with your arms swinging across, something in the lower part of you has to undo that excessive twist from the upper body, and I've seen people where their hips are like really swiveling as they run, but some runners, you can watch them run down the road, and their feet are flailing out to the left and right behind them, and you're like, well that is weird, and sometimes you'll just notice that their feet are flailing, and not notice. As, as running coaches that have been doing this for so long, I look at somebody's feet flailing and I immediately look at their arms and you're like, Oh yeah, arms are doing something weird also. Sometimes the, the arms cross excessively, and sometimes the arms hit the midline, but when they pull, like, back on it, instead of it sliding along their side or moving back towards, like, where their pocket is, the arm actually, like, Like, yeah, it extends outwards like you you almost open your arms out to the side like you're like you're gonna hug somebody like your Arms open up in front of you. So that also it's it's gonna lead to the same excessive twisting It's just excessive rotation in the other direction,

Angie:

right? And it's This is kind of also one of those chicken and the egg types of circumstances as well, right? You might be someone that has excessive arm swing because you have hip instability and hip weakness. Because your arms are trying to counterbalance and make up for what is going on in the legs, um, and in the hips. So if you are someone that has hip weakness, you might have, um, excessive arm swing, especially rotational arm swing, um, as a way to counterbalance that and make up for that. And by trying to kind of fix one, what happens to the other. So it's not necessarily that you have to fix the arm swing and that will automatically fix your hip pain and your back pain and your knee pain. You still have to do the strength training to especially strengthen the hips. Um, here in this case are really, really important because the motion from The arms really does come from your shoulders and from your upper back. And so by stabilizing your hips, you can help to even out some of that arm swing. But it's just good to know because arm swing can a lot of times be habitual. And so when you when you become more aware of it and start to, um, kind of correct that, then it can help to Yeah,

Kevin:

and if you've done the strength work, then you have the ability to actually undo it. If you really focus on trying to straighten your arms out, and suddenly your knees start hurting you, it's the same reason that I said that I was running more upright, is I had adjusted my form to make my hips hurt as little as possible. Like, there was pain going on, so I tweaked my form. One of The first things that I did when I got into coaching, like I was an assistant coach at the high school that I went to when I was still back in California. There was a freshman who had super awkward arms, like his elbows were flared out so far from his body. He didn't have this like crossing midline, but his elbows were just out so far, and I fixed his arms. Probably was not great coaching. We're not even going to go into the details of that, but the issue a hundred percent was this You know 14 15 year old high school boy had super super weak hips But, at the time, I was just trying to fix what I could see, instead of trying to fix the underlying issue. And so, I didn't actually fix anything. I made his arms look a little bit better, but didn't really improve anything. And he was still having knee pain. I was like, oh, maybe if I fix his arms, it'll fix his knee pain. No, he had issues with weak hips. I just didn't have the awareness to fix that. I knew what his arms looked like, and I knew what they were supposed to look like, and so I took care of that problem, but it didn't actually fix the issue.

Angie:

And it didn't actually take care of the problem, either. Because, I mean, even if his arms looked a little bit better, they were probably still not looking the way you wanted them to, because he was still trying to counterbalance his hips.

Kevin:

He looked less like a chicken with flapping wings. So, It was a lot closer to what the goal was, but

Angie:

that's part of the issue is that it doesn't actually get to the root cause of the problem. So instead of really focusing so much on your arm swing, if you are someone that has excessive arm swing, whether it's across your body or if it's out to the side, um, or if you're even over swinging front to back, that's another one that we can see too, is like that over swing front to back. Take that as a sign that you are, There might be something else going on, you know, like always look at hip strength first I would say because when you make your hips stronger and more mobile you can fix so many other issues But yes, so fixing arm swing isn't going to magically fix anything, which is why it's the third on our list. Um, beyond, you know, the other things that we've already talked about and really underlying all of this. Anytime you try to fix your running form, you need to improve your strength and your mobility. And that's one of the reasons that strength exercises and mobility exercises are so important for runners. Because when you get stronger and more mobile, you're running form a lot of times tends to take care of itself. A lot of these Problems that are that seem very obvious tend to go away because your body is doing a better job at both stabilizing itself and by generating more force for you to run faster and longer. So you're running form will naturally start to look more efficient as well.

Kevin:

Yeah, that's one of those things is there's a lot of of people out there that are like the running form gurus and they're like, we have to do this, this and this to make your running form perfect. And then there's the complete opposite side of the spectrum of people that are like, well, if you just run more, your body is going to optimize its running form. And there's, there's a nuance to that. Running more will optimize your running form for your current strengths and weaknesses. So if you have. weaknesses, you're going to optimize whatever is going to make those weaknesses be okay. And that might not be the best form for you. So if you increase your strength to a solid level where you are actually strong enough to run as far and as fast as you want to be going, and then you increase how much you're running, that combo will most likely Optimize your running for then there are some cues once once you've reached that point

Angie:

Yeah And I think that that really is is what it comes down to is making sure that you are stronger you're more more mobile And that's more of the goal What will help fix your running form and also make you more able to fix your running form because if you're trying to make some of these adjustments, but you don't have the mobility in your hips or in your spine or in your ankles, that's blocking you and limiting you from better form. Then that's going to be, you're almost gonna be working against yourself there.

Kevin:

Excellent. All right. So as like an overview, should we do like what, what should proper running form look like with arms? Yeah.

Angie:

Tell them what the arm should look like.

Kevin:

Okay. So. Take a deep breath and just kind of relax your shoulders because that's one of the other things is people bring their shoulders up They just it's related to posture, but they kind of crunch their shoulders up towards their neck So your arms should just be hanging nicely Freely next to you with no tension inside of them and then gently bring your arms up to around 90 degrees It doesn't have to be perfect. They could be bent a little bit more than 90 degrees They could be stretched out a little bit beyond 90 degrees It's somewhere in the ballpark of making 90 degrees with your elbow. And then, don't make super super tight fists with your hands. Like, your hands should be If you want a nice technique, touch your thumb to your pinky because it's really hard to make a fist if you touch your thumb to your pinky. So, just kind of loosely hold your hands together. If you have a tendency of, if you make a loose fist for it to become a tight fist, then maybe try the thumb to pinky trick. That might work for you, but it'll help reduce the tension that will go all the way up into your shoulders. So, relax your arms, bend the elbows to about 90 degrees, and And just nicely swing the arms in front of you to sort of balance out your legs, making sure that they don't cross the midline.

Angie:

Yeah. And if you want videos on this, um, you can go follow us on Instagram at real life runners. I have started to put some of, um, our running form videos on there. There, you might have to scroll down the page a little bit, but Kevin so nicely gives you some of these forms, um, or, Instructions and also demonstrates along the way so go if you're not following us already Check us out over at real life runners on Instagram, and that is yes with two L's real life

Kevin:

Real life

Angie:

people always ask me that like two L's and I'm like yes two L's

Kevin:

two L's two L's and how to swing your arms Appropriately I remember making that video. That's a good one.

Angie:

Yeah, so Those are the three main things that we really want you guys to focus on when it comes to running forum. If you have a question about running forum, also find me on Instagram and send me a DM. I love answering questions, especially from our podcast listeners over there on Instagram. So come hang out with me over there. And if you found this episode helpful, don't forget to leave us a review on Apple podcast, share it with a friend, take a screenshot and share it on your Instagram stories so that more people can find the podcast and benefit from all of the content that we put out on a weekly basis for you all. And when you leave us a review, that is a great way for you to also say thank you for all of the free content that we create for you every single week for the past almost seven years now, which is wild.

Kevin:

That can't be right. There's no way it's super

Angie:

cool. Um, and as always guys, thanks for spending this time with us. This has been the real life runners podcast, episode number 363. Now get out there and run your life.