Is it possible to improve your running form?

10 Components of Good Running Form – and talent is not on the list

By Catherina McKiernan, Certified Instructor, Chi Running

1) Flexibility: You need to have it, not only in your muscles, but in your tendons, ligaments, and joints. They all work better when they move with flexibility and any restrictions in your muscles, ligaments, or tendons will limit your range of motion, period.

Catherina crosses the line first in the Flora London Marathon, 1998. Pic Sportsfile

As we get older we tend to become less active. A good axiom that best describes this is: “Use it or lose it. “If you don’t use your muscles and joints they will begin to stiffen and then, if you still don’t do anything atrophy. Flexibility doesn’t just happen; you have to work at it. Even stretching a few minutes a day is enough for most people to maintain a good range of motion and decrease their chances of injury due to muscle pulls.

2) Good posture: Your form is totally dependent on your posture. The efficiency of your running form is directly proportional to the quality of your posture. What is good posture? According to Yoga teachers along with many other mainstream body movement disciplines, having good posture involves having a reasonably straight spine with not too much straightness and not too much bend. The more you slump, the more your body’s muscles need to work to hold you upright. Poor posture not only restricts the circulation of blood to your muscles and organs but also inhibits the oxygen supply to your brain, which is not good, especially when you try to do something like thinking or running.

3) Good leg motion: Having too long of a stride, or “over-striding” is a huge cause of both hamstring and knee injuries. This is when you land with your feet in front of you instead of under you. Not bending your knees when you run will create stiffness and poor circulation in your legs. Your knees should be bent at a 90 degree angle when you are warmed up and running at a good medium pace.

4) Tempo: Most people have too slow of a tempo. When you run you want to spend the least amount of time on your legs as possible. The longer you take with each stride, the more time your foot spends on the ground, and the more energy your legs have to expend to support your body weight. Even if it’s a split second during each stride, it adds up quickly when you’re talking about 1500 steps per mile. Strive to maintain a cadence of 85-90 strides per minute with each leg. If it’s difficult to do, shorten your stride length until if feels more comfortable to hold the cadence.

5) Body Sensing: You must develop a good ability to monitor and sense all of the major muscle groups of your body and to be able to sense tension or tightness in your muscles. Then you need to combine this with the ability to relax isolated muscle groups. This will help you to develop your strengths and make changes in the weak areas of your running form.

6) Good mental focus: Making changes takes mental focus. If you want to make adjustments to correct poor or improper movement patterns you will need to use your brain to re-educate your body. When you’ve felt, through Body Sensing, what adjustments you need to make to your running form, you can then use your mental focus to tell your body what to do, until it has learned the new form and does it naturally. This can be quite meditative and, if used properly, actually refreshes and renews your mental capacity.

7) Good upper body/lower body coordination: The general rule is that your upper body and lower body should be doing equal amounts of work. For most runners this 50/50 ratio is tilted one way or the other, resulting in a less than fluid running form. When your upper body and lower body are working in unison rather than against each other it spreads the work of running over the whole body and takes the load off of any single muscle group. It’s similar to the principle that work is best done if the responsibility is spread out over many workers.

Good breathing habits: Watch a baby breathing sometime. You won’t see their chest rise and fall with each breath. Instead you’ll see their abdominal area expand and contract like someone breathing in and out of a balloon. This is how we should breathe and it’s how you are taught to breathe in any yoga class. It’s called “belly breathing” and it’s how we should all be breathing all the time. When your breath is shallow, you use only the very upper part of your lungs and don’t take advantage of your total lung capacity. Oxygen is what your muscles use to convert stored fuels into usable energy and any reduction in your oxygen uptake will affect your ability to burn glycogen, which is your fuel.

If this way of breathing is new to you, you may want to practice it when you’re not running so that you can feel what it’s like before you try to do it on the run. When you exhale you should pull your belly button in towards your spine, which will empty the bottom of your lungs. Then, when you relax your abdominals, they’ll expand and draw air into the bottom of your lungs which will, in turn get more oxygen into your blood supply.

9) Having good bend in your knees and elbows: The less you bend your arms and legs, the more work your muscles have to do when you’re running. An arm or leg that is bent at the knee or elbow will swing much easier than one that is straight. As you approach your “cruising” speed, your forearms and shins should both be parallel to the ground in mid-swing.

10) Staying relaxed: This includes having a good sense of humor and having the ability to observe what is going on within you and around you and responding wisely to those observations. When I’m relaxed I reduce my chances of straining a tight muscle. If I’m not relaxed my muscles will be tighter and will therefore restrict the range of motion in my arms and legs, thus robbing me of the ability to run at higher speeds comfortably. A relaxed runner will spend less time recovering from a race than an inefficient runner who is burning more fuel for the same amount of distance.

Good running form doesn’t just happen. It needs to be learned and created and worked at constantly. An efficient runner will do much less work over a given distance than an inefficient runner, which translates into an ability to do one of two things: either run more easily at a faster rate of speed or be able to run farther at a slower speed.