A Masterclass on Running Form

Guest [00:00:05]: I'm Doug Adams and you're listening to the Run to the Top podcast.

Finn Melanson [00:00:13]: Hello, fellow runners. I'm your host Finn Milanson, and this is the Run to the Top podcast podcast dedicated to making you a better runner with each and every episode we are created in. Produced by the expert team of coaches@runnersconnect.net where you can find the best running.

Finn Melanson [00:00:29]: Information on the Internet, as well as.

Finn Melanson [00:00:31]: Training plans to fit every runner and every budget. Should runners be practicing their form? Running is one of the few sports that we typically spend all of our time training for, but not necessarily practicing the fundamentals of. And we may be making a mistake there because running is a highly skilled movement and while there is no perfect running form, many listeners of the show may be wondering whether we should look to optimize form to boost performance and reduce injuries. Here to answer all of these questions and provide a master class on the subject is Doug Adams, a physical therapist who has published and spoken at an international level on all things related to running. He's taught thousands of professionals his approach to running gate analysis and designed and created a widely adopted portable 3D motion analysis system called Helix 3D for analyzing and categorizing running form. Specifically, we cover how running gate impacts overall running performance, common mistakes or inefficiencies in running form, specific drills or exercises that can help running form, and how optimizing running form can improve performance and reduce the risk of injuries in the long run. Let's dig in. Today's episode is sponsored by Magnesium Breakthrough from Bioptimizers. Their industry leading magnesium supplement helps you sleep better and reduce stress. Head to magbrakethrough.com. Run to the Top to learn more and save 10%. Timeline Nutrition has developed a groundbreaking product called Mitopure that revitalizes your mitochondria, which create energy in nearly every cell in your body. Head to Timelinenutrition.com to learn more.

Finn Melanson [00:02:21]: Doug Adams, it's a pleasure to have you on the Run to the Top podcast.

Guest [00:02:25]: Honor to be here, Finn. Thanks so much for having me. We have a lot to talk about.

Finn Melanson [00:02:30]: Today, and I want to get right into the meat of the conversation. We're talking a lot about running form, gait analysis, its impact on long term well being in the sport of running, training, getting ready for races. And I think the first question I want to ask you, how does running gate impact overall performance? Because I think there's a lot of people out there who've been told that you should just stick to your natural or God given running form. And as soon as you start running, you're already running correctly versus there's some things you can optimize. So can you break that down a little bit?

Guest [00:03:02]: Yeah, I get that kind of saying a lot, like, well, just you're born to run a certain way, right? And I was like, well, I learned to shoot a basketball underhand and eventually somebody had to teach me how to shoot overhand, and nobody's ever made it to the NBA shooting underhand, so we're not just naturally bored to do a certain movement here. There's a lot of ways that we can optimize our form. And I think running is a very interesting sport in the respect that outside of maybe the sprinting population and a few really serious, dedicated runners, people never really practice the run form. They don't think about what that form looks like. They're not thinking about how they can optimize it. And I think that that's an area of tremendous growth for the running community because we know injury rates are so high, and we know that upwards of 80% of runners get injured every year, and a lot of that might be due to training, but a lot of that could be prevented with improving form. And I have to say, there's no perfect form. Right. I think that's an important thing to talk about first when we're talking about that, that we're not trying to get everyone to run the same way, but we are able to identify areas that we know put increased stresses on the body that best case are just going to limit performance. Worst case are going to silence you for an injury. And that's what I've really as a physical therapist, I've dedicated my career to kind of figuring out how we can get a lot out of a little change there. Right. One of my favorite studies that I ever quote is the Stuart Warden article from 2021 that said, if you reduce the stress of each step by 10%, you can run twice as far before your body breaks down. Wow, like 10% we're not talking about. You'll barely even perceive some of that change. And when we do gate analysis, people are saying, like, night and day, they're seeing a big difference. So it's really easy to get that 10%. And that's not to go into too much of an origin story, but when I was at University of Delaware and really working a lot with 3d motion analysis labs and doing research, that's what we started to notice is we started to find these patterns of runners and things that runners were commonly doing that we knew in the literature was causing increased stress on their body. So we started to create all of these interventions and these courses teaching other physical therapists and how to evaluate and assess this and improve those common running gate categories that we identified so that we could see that somebody could really optimize their form. So I know I just threw a lot out there.

Finn Melanson [00:05:46]: No, this is great. This is great. And I think another question off of that. I think if you asked a lot of viewers and listeners of this episode what the composition of preparing for a run looks like, they'll tell you about the warm up, they'll tell you about the cool down. Even within the run, they'll talk about certain paces. There's a workout day. There's a shakeout day. There's, like, a long run type day. It seems like the picture you're painting. A lot of runners overlook the importance of very specifically drilling for running form. And why do you think that gets overlooked? Especially when, as you're describing, there's more than just marginal gains to be had here?

Guest [00:06:24]: There's a really good reason why most people actually don't focus on their form, and it's because running is actually a really highly skilled activity that's really hard to know what you're doing. We get that race photo once in a while, and other than looking at, like, race face or, like, oh, man, I can't believe I spilled all over myself or something. We don't really get a lot of feedback about our running, and running is actually what we call a continuous activity, and that's something different compared to something like golf or basketball. When you hit a golf ball, you know immediately up, I shanked it to the right, and it didn't go very far, which is what I do when I hit a golf ball. Right. When you're running, you get no feedback about how that step is. You don't know if that was a good step or a bad step. You just know that you're going a certain speed. And that makes it very challenging for runners to identify what do they need to do and are they doing it correctly. There's a study that's really commonly cited that they asked half of they took Masters and collegiate runners, and they said, do you land on your heel, or do you land on the front of your foot? Less than half got it right. So that's one of the easiest things to tell about Rutting, is, like, am I a heel striker? Am I a four foot striker? And half of these high level rudders couldn't even tell you whether they were actually what part of their foot they were landing on. And that should give you a lot of information. Like, when we do a gate analysis, there's tons of variables that we're looking at, right. And people just can't understand without having sometimes a professional look at it. So they don't know what they should focus on. And that's why I think a lot of people, when they focus on form, what are the top things you hear about right? Like, what part of my foot did I land on? That's a little easier. At least you got a 50 50 chance of about being right if you're doing it or not there and then a lot of what became very popular was cadence. Everyone started saying, like, oh, yeah, our watch gives us feedback on that. So that is something that we can get some feedback on, but it is not always something that there is no perfect form, that 180 is not an actual number that everyone needs to be shooting for, but it's just something that people can monitor and see. And that's why a lot of people focus on that if they're focusing on form at all. But to your point, most people are skipping that. They're not thinking about how am I doing drills? What am I doing, how should I be performing this? Should I be burying my gate when I run? How should I focus on when I run uphill? And there's so much that we can do to help out with form that would have such a big impact, but people don't know where to start, so they just don't start at all.

Finn Melanson [00:09:09]: I think it's very helpful that you framed it as a continuous activity. And because it's a continuous activity, the feedback mechanism can be super delayed.

Guest [00:09:18]: Right?

Finn Melanson [00:09:19]: Like, people might not suffer the consequences.

Finn Melanson [00:09:21]: Of poor form for months to years, right?

Guest [00:09:24]: Exactly. Yeah. Running injuries typically have a four to six week delay. So you could think that you're doing everything great and then four weeks later you're like, I don't know what happened, I just started breaking down. And it was something that you did four to six weeks ago because running injuries are micro trauma, which is opposed to something macro trauma for football. You get tackled and you break a leg. It happens immediately. You get ephemeral stress reaction from running. It happens gradually over weeks, months, years even. And that's why it's really hard in that continuous activity where we just go from one step to the next to the next. We're never stopping and getting feedback unless you're using something like 3D or doing things like that, that really help you understand what your form looks like. One of my joys of working with runners, many joys of working with runners, but when you show them their form and they look at and they're like, oh, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, no wonder my right knee hurts, right? Like, I can't believe that no one ever told me this before. Those are things I hear day in and day out doing gate analysis with all levels of runners. And it's just really rewarding because it's so eye opening for people to realize what does their form actually look like?

Finn Melanson [00:10:40]: Are we able to put a ballpark.

Finn Melanson [00:10:42]: Figure on the percentage of runners that right out the gate start with pretty optimal form? Or is it one of those scenarios where almost everybody has something to work on or everybody has something to work on?

Guest [00:10:56]: I think most people have something to work on. Right now, the order of priority is a little bit of where we'll say, are you going to start working on this now or later type thing. And what I mean by that is when we analyze a runner, I'm a big proponent of gate analysis and gateway training and that's kind of what we're talking about here. And I love gate analysis and I think it's something that unfortunately, even in my profession, a lot of people, it's a missing piece of the puzzle that few people are doing and you really want to find somebody that knows what they're doing with it. But that is a piece of the puzzle and we're going to stage it with other things too. We do something called a runner readiness assessment. And with that we're going to analyze your mobility and what we call motor control. So how flexible are you? How strong are you? How well can you control your body throughout different motions? So we look at that and we stage that and even consider like, I do a 90 minutes gait analysis with a lot of my clients and we go through and we are looking at everything from their training, their weightlifting, their mobility, their motor control, their sleep, their nutrition, their mental beliefs, their breathing patterns. We look at everything. And the gate is an essential piece of that that needs to be put in because we know things. There's a couple of things we know about running and activities that are really important, right? One is that running doesn't make you stronger. I think that that's something that most runners don't realize but should realize. Like you don't get stronger running, your legs don't get stronger actually when you run okay? And then the second thing that goes with that, strengthening doesn't improve form. So if your hips are dropping when you're running, you can't strengthen your hips and change your form with it. So the answer is yes, you need to do both, right? And that most people should be working on optimizing their form because our movement patterns can shift. If you sprain an ankle, you're going to change the way you move. If you had maybe a really bad night's sleep or if you had something you sat a lot and you took a flight and you got stiff on a plane, those movement patterns can change. And we need to make sure that we're looking at maintaining and optimizing those movement patterns. So we should be to answer your question, everyone probably should be focusing on some aspect of their running form. Just like an NBA player still goes and shoots some free throws even though maybe they're shooting 90%, they're still practicing free throws and dribbling drills in practice.

Finn Melanson [00:13:34]: You said a lot of interesting stuff. There one thing I want to focus on here, your comment that strengthening doesn't improve form. And I think that that might be a really insightful comment for some listeners, myself included, because I had always been under the assumption that if I go into the gym and I work on certain core exercises, for example, that's going to create an effect where mid race I'm staying upright longer, like my posture is better and therefore, if I move down the kinetic chain things are just firing more efficiently. But you're saying that that's not the case, if I understand correctly. So for folks like me that might be confused, like what are the use cases for strength training if it's not in part for improving running form.

Guest [00:14:14]: Yeah. So I'm a huge proponent of strength training, right? And I think runners need to do strength training, and we have to understand what is the goal of strength training and what is the goal of form. And so what I'm saying is that, like your example, you might be able to maintain a better posture. If you're already in a certain posture and you add more tissue capacity, meaning that your muscles are stronger, you probably can maintain that posture for longer. But if you were trying to change that posture, let's say that you were leaning forward and you were already in that just by strengthening your core, your back muscles, you're not going to all of a sudden come upright. You have to do skill training. And strength training are actually occupied in different areas of your brain, right? So skill training, there's something called cortical reorganization, right? So it actually teaches you how to learn and how to do new things when you do skill training that strength training doesn't touch with. So the typical example, an easier example, is maybe somebody who's their knees collapse inward, right? And a lot of people that see, they're going to say, oh, you've got weak hips and your knees are collapsing in. And this is what they've done in a lot of the physical therapy literature say, great, let's strengthen everyone's hips and let's see if their form improves. And guess what? Their knees are still collapsing in. And there's been countless studies that have shown it's not going to change your form. Now, you might be still I'll talk about the benefits of strength training in a second. You might still feel better with the strength training because what you're doing, there's a term that we use called the envelope of function. So, like, how much force can you stuff into this envelope? So if you're having pain on the outside of your knee because your knees are collapsing inward, by strengthening your hips, you can absorb more of that force. But what you haven't done is remove the amount of high forces acting on your body in the first place. So you're just kicking the can down the road. And then when you up your training or when you up your intensity, all of a sudden you're going to go back to having lateral knee pain, right? So that's why you have to do both strength training. And so with the strength training, what we see, there's a couple of real benefits. There's a lot of benefits, right? The way I explain it to runners and why they should be doing strength training, and I think it's important to talk about what type of strength training, and I could talk about that in a second. But strength training what we're going to see when we run we said just a second ago that running doesn't increase strength. We're not on the ground for long enough. And even though the forces are high, it doesn't create enough tension in the muscles to really tell our body that we need to be stronger for that. But doing strength training does, and it actually helps us to activate more muscles. So a lot of the benefits of strength training come from learning how to engage those muscles in a more efficient manner. And that's what we see a lot of benefit there. There's a term called running economy. Have you heard of that? I don't know if you've talked about that on the show before, but it's.

Finn Melanson [00:17:26]: A really love all things economy.

Guest [00:17:28]: Yes. Right. Running economy. I equate to like miles per gallon in the car, right. How much energy do you have to put in to get an output? And what we see is that strength training and running form are both impactful for running economy and make a big difference so that you can work less to get the same output or you'll work the same and get a faster or farther output from what you're doing there. So that's a really important term. And that's why the type of strength training that we do is really important as well. If you're going to the gym and doing three sets of 15, I might say you might as well just go for a run. And it's not to say that there's never a place in time for that. But what we should be focusing on, runners in the weight room is doing heavy lifts. We should be focusing on things like four sets of four. And taking lots of rest between the gym is not another time. It's not cross training. It is strength training. We're not trying to get our cardiovascular system a workout while we're doing a strength session here, although it does work your heart in a different way that endurance activities can. But we're trying to actually make our muscles proportionally stronger. And when we do a high weight with low reps and like four sets of four, what we do is we make the muscles that we have proportionally stronger, and that's going to make you more efficient as a runner there. And that's why we should be really focusing on activities that recreate the stresses on our body and are similar to the stresses that we experience with running there. So I think of exercises a little differently as what's functional and what's not functional there.

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Finn Melanson [00:23:10]: One more thing I want to touch on before we get into like identifying issues and prescriptions and whatnot you mentioned like doing readiness assessments and gate analysis earlier with runners. And I'm sure there are some people out there that like to take an independent approach. Are there any scenarios where runners can take this issue on their own and self assess their running form and identify areas of improvement?

Guest [00:23:34]: Like, if there are people out there.

Finn Melanson [00:23:36]: That want to do that, what are your thoughts there?

Guest [00:23:39]: Yeah, I think it is because unfortunately, we don't always all have access to somebody that is informed with that. And just like small shameless plug here for a second, but we've trained almost 10,000 people in our courses. They're called certified running gate analysts and they've been trained in this and we have like a find a provider. So if you want some help with it, go find somebody that's been trained on it, right? We've trained a bunch of people on this and taught thousands of people how to do it. But if you're looking to do it on, there's a top tier fundamental movements that we do for the runner readiness assessment. And I think people are always surprised. And the way that we designed this actually was to be an independent assessment that people could actually do. And the way I use it is even to see how much I should warm up before run. So there's five movements with it, right, that we ask people to do. We ask them to touch their toes, we ask them to bend backwards, rotate balance on one leg for 10 seconds with their eyes closed and squat. And if you're unable to do any of those movements, it doesn't tell us maybe why, but we know that those are fundamental movements and one of our practitioners that we've trained can tell you why, right. They can start to identify, well, you're not squatting because of a tight ankle or you can't touch your toes actually because of neurotension or tight hamstrings. Most people are going to think, right? But you can self assess and say, I can't do some of those things and what can I do to warm it? Like, this is what I do before I go for a run in the morning. I go through those five movements and if I can't do those, I spend a little bit more time warming up. If I can do all those, great, I'm not going to spend a lot of time warming up because my body's moving pretty well here, right? So I have some movements that I know are fundamental and there's elements of there that I need for running. And if I can't do that, then I need to go back and do a little warm up until I feel like, oh yeah, maybe I'm not touching my toes, but I'm six inches closer so I'm more ready to run there. And that's why we called it the Runner Readiness Assessment, so that people can self assess.

Finn Melanson [00:25:51]: I was going to say if you go through those five movement patterns and you find that you can't do them, but then you work on them until they're ready. Is an inability to successfully do any of those five steps a sign of a pending injury? Is that like a red flag?

Guest [00:26:11]: No. Yeah, it's a good point, right? I'm not telling you stop running if you can't do all those five movements. Right? This is just to give kind of like we said, even with form, we're not expecting perfection here. You don't have to have perfect running form because no such thing exists. Right. You don't have to have perfect movement because no such thing exists. What it is trying to help you do is prioritize because we all don't have countless hours in the day. Even like I work with a lot of professional runners and even they, we can't have them do an unlimited amount of stretches and exercises because with them we're really managing their total training load and their total stress on their body. So I can't have them do 8 hours of exercises a day and 4 hours of running a day. It's not going to work. So you don't have to be perfect at those movements, but it might help you to understand, like, hey, if somebody can't squat, a very typical thing is the ankle mobility is going to limit them from that. So you should be working on your ankle mobility as you go and it helps you prioritize. And if you work on your ankle mobility and then all of a sudden you can touch your toes better and balance better and squat better. That was a really good use of your time here. So I'm a minimum effective dosage person. Spend two minutes to do something instead of 20, but focus the two minutes on the thing that matters most to your body. Yeah.

Finn Melanson [00:27:37]: It reminds me, and you said this earlier in the conversation, about how with immediate feedback that comes from shooting a free throw or swinging a golf club. The other benefit of those activities is you can kind of do them in perpetuity. Like Kobe Bryant could get into the gym at 04:00 a.m. Shoot 1000 free throws 3 hours later, run it back. Especially as it relates to running form. Are there any relatively non stressful activities that you can kind of do in perpetuity and get to a point of mastery for that particular component of the running form that aren't incredibly taxing like drills?

Guest [00:28:11]: You're saying or things like that. That would be helpful. Yeah. So drills, I think, again, along the lines of gate analysis being a missing piece, I think drills are really underutilized things with runners. Step back and think about, well, why do we do drills and why do we break things down, right? And why did Kobe Bryan shoot 1000 free throws? Right? He's analyzing and he's looking at the elements of it, right? And he might focus on where his elbow is and how high his elbow is and is it out, is it in, what's his position? Where is he holding the ball? There's lots of elements that you can break down. Well, it's hard with running to break those elements down because it's a continuous activity and you can't stop yourself in midair and be like, oh, let me adjust my swing phase real quick. You're going to actually have to use drills to help you figure out elements of that. And there's some drills there's a couple of drills that I recommend all runners do, no matter what, that are really beneficial. And maybe we can even link to some videos of doing this or something. A marching drill is a very common thing that I think every runner should do some element of. And there's some nuances about how to do it correctly, though, and it's all in the details. Like when you do drills, you can just go through the motions of it and be like, I don't know if that's helping me very much, but if you do the drills correctly, you'll really have this little bit of an AHA moment where you're like, oh, that's what you're wanting me to do? So a marching drill is great. One of the most common things that we see with runners is that they overstride. It's a very common thing that we see. And what we mean by overstriding is that you land with your foot too far in front of your center of mass too far in front of your body. And this is actually something I'm a big proponent of getting a 3D analysis because we get way more information, way more accuracy. But this is something that is fairly easy to do in two dimensions. What you're able to do is if you have somebody filming you from the side or you're looking at it there, try to get them at the level of about your knee with the camera and they film them. And if you just freeze frame at the point at which your foot hits the ground, if you draw a line directly up from that ankle bone on the outside, that's called your lateral melliolis. The ankle bone on the outside, if you draw a line straight up from that, and if that line goes in front of your knee, there's a chance that there's a good chance that you're overstriding. And what we know that does is it puts a lot of stress on the body and it can put people that have knee pain, hip pain, back pain, shin pain, it can relate to all those different things. So we teach these marching drills as a way to improve the overstriding mechanics. And we have people focus on and one of the cues that I give people because we're using these cues and we give weird cues, they seem really weird because we can't tell somebody like, don't do that, or just like, bend your knee, right? If we tell somebody that they're landing with their knee too straight, I can't say, bend your knee, because then they're going to feel really awkward with that. It's going to constrain their movement. And we use something called external feedback, right? An external focus of control. And so when I have somebody marching, I stand in front of them and I act like I'm throwing a soccer ball to them and they have to knead the ball back to me. Because a lot of people, when you think they're doing, like, marching drills, you would think they'd be juggling a soccer ball and they're lifting their knees up. And when people do that and they try to run, it looks very funny because all of a sudden, they're like, sitting way back. They're like, lean way back and it looks really awkward and it doesn't feel good to them. And they're like, what are you doing? This is crazy. But asking them to drive their knee forward like they're kneeing a soccer ball. What that does from a biomechanical standpoint, it gets them to drive the knee forward, which engages and it puts the Glutes on stretch for a second, which causes them to extend their leg so that before they hit the ground, their leg is going backwards instead of going forward. And that's going to address a lot of those overstriding mechanics that we see. It's also going to help them put their shin bone in the right position. Because if you just lift your leg up, your foot may be still in front of your body, but if you knee a soccer ball, your foot stays underneath of your hip and you're going to land in a better position with it. So that's a drill. I think I went off on a really long tangent there, so sorry. That was great. That's a drill. That's a way that anyone can assess themselves and anyone can start to look at that and use that as a drill. That will be helpful in order to learn just how they can maybe see some small improvements in their form. But then the next part is you got to actually think about that also in driving that knee a bit and marching a bit while you're running. But the crucial step is getting some feedback, getting somebody to tell you, like, that looks good, you're doing a good job of that, or, no, you need to do this a little differently.

Finn Melanson [00:33:10]: There's just one thing that I want to talk about before we get a little bit further down the rabbit hole of drills. And that's just other common mistakes or inefficiencies like overstriding that you see in these runners that lead to injuries, running, formulated injuries. What might some of those be? And I think based off of those inefficiencies and mistakes, we can talk more about drills like the marching drill.

Guest [00:33:36]: Yeah. So we've developed part of this going back into the backstory a little bit. I told you I was doing research and I used to teach a lot of courses kind of on general physical therapy topics. And we started noticing these patterns and we identified five main categories and these are the most common things that we see people do. And it doesn't mean you're just doing one of these. You might be doing multiple of them. And that's fair, that's okay. And again, none of this is telling you not to run. There's lots of people that can do this, but we're saying we should optimize your form because maybe it's working for you. Now, this is an objection we get a lot of times. And when I teach a course, a lot of times I'll ask everybody at the beginning on the first day, I'll say, okay, if you have a runner that doesn't have any injuries and they come in and you notice that their form is not optimal, would you change their form? And it's about 50 50 of people saying yes and people saying no. And there's a lot of people that will debate me on this and I'm wide open to it. Love to have that debate with somebody, but my answer is yes, right? Because they're not injured yet. When their condition changes, the stresses might become overbearing for what they're able to accept there. So just because they're not injured yet doesn't mean they won't in the future. Because guess what? We're all getting older every day. And if I go from running 30 miles a week to 40 miles a week, that same form that worked for me at 30 might not work for me at 40. And it might be enough to throw me over the injury threshold there so tangent. But going back to those five categories, what we found is these are the most common things that we see. So we talked about the overstrider and that's probably one of the most common. The second is going to be the collapser. And the collapser is somebody who is what we call kind of losing the frontal and transverse plane battle against gravity. And what that means is that you've probably seen this person, they're running down the street and their knees are touching, their hips are dropping side to side. If there's a female or somebody with long hair, their hair might be whipping back and forth. We call that the ponytail sign. But that's somebody that's collapsing where there's a lot of rotation and there's a lot of frontal plane collapsing in. So those are probably the most common two common ones that we see. But then there's three other ones that we also look at. One of those that I've even published some studies on is bouncing. So we see that people have an excessive vertical oscillation where they go up and down a lot. Yeah, right? Trail runner. I'm not incredibly surprised at that. We see that a lot with trail runners where they tend to be a little bit more bouncy. They're used to taking shorter steps and they limit some of their motion, but they're bouncing up and down a lot. And think about the inefficiency of that over the course of 1020 miles run. Right? If you're doing trail stuff, a lot of times you're doing longer stuff. Just think of how much efficiency is lost when you're bouncing. So another category here that we will often see is a glute amnesiac, right? And this is kind of just a little bit of a cheeky name there. It means that somebody if you I'm dating myself, but that old school movie Weekend of Bernie's where he's kind of like leaning back, and the Glute amnesiac is the person that's just taking their butt for a run. By leaning backwards, you reduce the demand on the Glutes and you put a lot more stress on the front of your knee. I tell this story during these courses when I teach them to other physical therapists about how I had this one guy, he was a big time executive at a fortune, like 50 Company, right? He was running a marathon. He had a bet with his budy that he was going to beat him in this race, but he developed anterior knee pain and he couldn't run more than 6 miles. And he got to the point where every step he had pain. So he books two days with me, right? He says, I want to book your whole time. I want to come down. I need you to fix me. I need to run this marathon. I think he had a big bet going on this. So he flew down in his private jet, came in, we talked to him, we evaluated him, looked at things overall pretty good. We get him up on the treadmill, and he's just like a clear cut Glute amnesiac where he's just leaning way back. So I just go over him. After a minute or two, he's like, you have a knee pain? Yeah. Okay. I want you to pretend like you're running into the wind or like you're running uphill. And he does, and he kind of looks over at me quickly, and I was like, you have any pain? He's like, no. And I said, okay, we'll run for another minute or two. So he keeps running, and then two minutes, three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes, no knee pain. So he's like, what do you mean? How did you do that? Right? I thought this was going to take two days. So he goes away, goes out, has a nice dinner, comes back the next day, runs for another. He does 5 miles on the treadmill, no pain, gets back on his jet and says, take the rest of the day off. You're good, right? So it's a really simple thing to do. He just had to lean forward. But it's a good example of how the reason we use these categories is to help us explain to the runner what they're doing so that they can conceptualize it and make a change. But it's also to prioritize, we have to know what's the biggest thing that we really need to focus on. And then the last one, the fifth one is a weaver. And this is another one we commonly see in the trail running population because of single track that they'll run with a very narrow base of support and instead of having a little wider step length, they'll run very narrow. And you get somebody that's had some chronic it band issues and you see that they're weaving. You can, again be a hero to them really quick by just teaching them how to run with a wider base of support so their feet a little more separated. And that takes a lot of stress off the lateral side of the body. So there's some subcategories of those. Not to get too geeky about this, but those are the five things that we most commonly see amongst runners that we'll look to address and change.

Finn Melanson [00:39:48]: We certainly have some trail runners in this audience. And I think I'm curious, when you think about the penalties of bad running form, can you get away with more or less on certain surfaces? Like, if you have poor form in a certain area, can you get away with those mistakes for longer? On road versus trailer, vice versa? Is there anything interesting to be said between the surfaces debate here?

Guest [00:40:13]: Yes, the surfaces is an interesting one, and again, I might talk nerdy a little bit here about this, but there's obviously different compliance with the surface, right? And if you're running on trails, it's not as rigid, not as stiff. But the interesting thing about the surface debate is that actually running on a very soft, compliant surface can actually be much harder on your body than a firm surface. And the reason that is there's a concept called stiffness. So our body has an optimal stiffness. And the way that I explain this a lot of times is imagine that our body is acting like a spring and we're just like a weight sitting on top of the spring. So there's this feeling that we have when we run that if you have a really stiff spring, you're not going to go through much motion, right? If you have a really loose spring, you're going to go through a lot of motion. Our body tends to like a certain amount of stiffness, and when we go from a very hard surface where we have to be less stiff, right. Because we need to absorb the forces in a different way. When we go to a very compliant surface, like running on a turf field, and we see a lot of turf injuries, right. When you're running on a turf field, there might be increased stiffness in your body because the surface is so much more compliant. So you have to consider how your body interacts with the surface. And when we see a high amount of stiffness now, stiffness has never been really there's some growing evidence here, but the debate is still a little bit out if it predicts injuries, but it definitely has an impact on performance. But if you run on a very compliant surface and you increase the stiffness in your joints, you might be putting more wear and tear on your joints and be more likely to have different types of injuries. So we can't definitively say, like, you're more or less likely to be injured with some of these things. But if somebody has a change in their stiffness, like somebody has an arthritic knee, maybe a middle aged runner that has maybe some changes there, running on a really soft surface or in really thick cushy shoes might actually be not beneficial for them, which is kind of counterintuitive to a lot of what people would think.

Finn Melanson [00:42:37]: I was just going to ask, does this extend to a shoe midsole, like a high cushion Hocus shoe versus a low cushion like Merrill Trail glove from back in the day?

Guest [00:42:48]: Yes, we could probably spend a whole conversation talking about shoes and things like that. I'll say some of the modern technology and shoes has kept me very busy. And I think part of that, that's not just on the shoe manufacturers, I think some of it's a little us runners have to take a little ownership in that and saying like, well, I can run faster and I'm just going to do it all the time now because these shoes let me. So I'm not going to throw shoes under the bus with some of this. But yes, there is an effect and there is some literature to go that having very high stack height, very cushy shoes might not always be the best for certain demographics of people, and it might put some stress on the body that our body doesn't really like. And the problem is, like we said earlier, these injuries have a four to six week delay, so it might take a while and you're like, I love these shoes. They feel great in the store and then you run in them for a while and they don't feel as good a couple of weeks later. That's why actually, I would have even told you some differences in opinion on shoes and their effect on mechanics a couple of months ago. But we started doing a lot of gate analysis where when we do the 3D analysis, there's only two sensors that are on the shoe, actually physically, so we can compare people really quickly in different types of shoes. And I started with myself and then I started getting friends in and then clients in, and we started comparing different types of shoes. And the challenge is, and I'm sorry, audience here for the runners out there, the challenge is we can't just say like, oh, you run this way, you need this specific brand of shoe because everyone responds very differently to very different types of shoes. But there are shoes that are definitely better for some people than others. And when I pick shoes, I have a couple of rules with that, right? First, number one, it has to be comfortable. Two, it needs to be lightweight because you could have a really comfortable shoe and if it's really heavy, it's going to cause a lot of strain on your running economy. It's going to really lower that value. But three, the third rule is that it can't adversely affect your mechanics. Because we see a lot of times when people get in shoes that take away some of the negative impact of faulty mechanics. They'll run with these faulty mechanics and they're like, well, I don't break down until six or 7 miles into the run. Well, yeah, your shoes let you have these bad mechanics with no repercussions for a long time and then you're breaking down. But what you were doing at the beginning was what caused you the pain at 7 miles? Nothing like switched at 7 miles. It just you had faulty mechanics and it gave you enough runway to get through those 1st 7 miles.

Finn Melanson [00:45:42]: One more question on this shoe front and then I do want to get back to the drills and stuff. Where do you fall in the debate around barefoot running, like even incorporating it like once or twice a week? Does barefoot running have a place in the realm of helping to restore proper form mechanics?

Guest [00:46:01]: Well, so this is a great segue back into drills because my opinion on this, one of my mentors was Irene Davis. She was in the Born to Run book there. She was kind of the PT focused on and one of the main proponents of barefoot running and still a barefoot running proponent. And Irene is one of the greatest minds in the sport. She's done a great job of researching and things like that. And my opinion and we all have our own sticks, right? My opinion is that barefoot running is a drill, not a goal, in my opinion here. And I will utilize barefoot running in the clinic to teach somebody how to improve their form. But I think it's hard for somebody, if you really want to go barefoot and you're willing to put the nine months in to transition to it, great. It can be something that can be beneficial for you done under the right circumstances. And with a whole lot of other things, like you got to prepare your foot, you got to prepare your ankle or your body, you need to slowly transition and go through it. It's a nine month process in my opinion. And most people aren't going to take that time to do it. They want to do it in like a month and that's just not enough time. So in my opinion, there's others that will debate me out there on that, just given the full information out there. But I use barefoot running as a way to help people understand how and give them a little bit more feedback about what their form is. Because we talked about we don't get a lot of feedback on how we're doing things, but we'll get some feedback on how it's going. Right, so you can feel if there's really high stress on your body, you might not know why you're like, oh, it's because I'm doing this at my knee or my hips doing this. But if you get more feedback about the impact of it, that can be helpful. And so using barefoot running as a drill is a great way. Like with a lot of my professional runners, we really promote people doing a lot of foot drills, ankle drills, doing some strides in barefoot on grass. It's a great tool. But I'm not one that's likely to tell people like, hey, throw your shoes out and just run barefoot. And that's going to solve all your issues.

Finn Melanson [00:48:25]: I think. Earlier in the conversation you talked about the five pre run assessments you should do every morning. We talked about the marching drill. I know a lot of this stuff is visual and we'll make sure to link to all of your videos and articles in the show notes, but are there any other common drills that you often prescribe that fit well on the podcast medium to describe?

Guest [00:48:50]: Yeah, there's another drill that I really love runners to do and I call it the wall drill. And this is not my own drill. This is taken from lots of other really smart people as well there and probably people have seen a variation of this sprinters use it a lot. But basically you get in a leaned position with your hands on the wall, go up on your toes a little bit and then you practice a little bit of that knee drive in that position. But it's a great way and I use this with we talked about the five different categories of runners. No matter which of those five you fit into, you can use this wall drill as a way to focus your attention of how to improve it. So for example, the wall drill, what you do, you stand up, you're leaning against the wall, you've got one leg like you're driving up, like you hit pause on the button, pause button. Just when your 1ft is about to come off the ground and your other foot is in the air, that's kind of what it looks like. And then you start doing exchanges. So you start by just holding that position, but then you switch in midair and you're switching back and forth. So if you're an overstrider, what we can do is we can put a piece of tape on the ground where your feet should land. And if you start landing in front of that piece of tape, you're getting a cue that lets you know, and you're getting that feedback to understand that you're starting to overstride and you're moving forward, as opposed to letting your foot land further underneath of your body and going in the right position. That way our bouncer right Finn, for you here. You could put a piece of tape on the wall, and then you could focus on minimizing the amount of up and down motion that happens while you're switching legs and making sure that you're not going too up and down. So there's individual cues that we use for each of those categories. But that would be another great drill that I think a lot of people could do. We do big team screens for collegiate teams, high school teams. They'll bring their whole team to our clinic, and we'll analyze the whole team and kind of give them some drills. And we'll have them partner up with each other, and that way they can give each other some feedback to be like, oh, that looked good. Or, no, you pick that knee up more, drive the knee more or your hips are collapsing. So the wall drill is a good one, especially if people are running in a group or on a team. That's something like for the cross country coaches out there, track coaches, this is something I would recommend you do with all of your athletes, is make this part of your warm up. Line them up along the fence or along a wall, have them partner up, teach them a little bit. It's worth the time. We do this with a lot of the local teams around here. We'll go out, we'll show everyone how to do it. And it's just a great way to get people to learn the movement pattern that we're asking them to do and slowing it down. Because sometimes it is really hard to change your form if you don't get feedback about what you're doing and you don't understand what you're doing. Now, when we give you the appropriate feedback, it's actually pretty easy. When we do a Gain office, I think people are really surprised that we're able to make such a big difference in such a short amount of time, where we're able to say, hey, this is what you need to do. We build algorithms into the computer that interpret all the data for us really fast, and it makes a big difference. But we get to the important one quickly, and when you know what to do, it makes a big difference and then practicing it with things like marching and the wall drill are a really great way to help people out. And I think these are different drills that aren't like, you're not seeing a lot of instagram post of people doing marching and wall drills because everyone loves the skips and bounding and hopping and I love a lot of that stuff too. And don't get me wrong, there's some really good drills with that wickets and all sorts of things. But I think that those two are probably a really good starting place for somebody to get familiar and just kind of just get oriented to doing some drills, which I do think practicing your running form, like my kind of career goal is to get everyone to know and improve their form. And that's a lot of what we do. So I would love to see people doing more drills and form technique.

Finn Melanson [00:53:03]: I think one of the last topics I want to discuss is just the results of all this. Like you mentioned earlier, how with barefoot running, you kind of have to clear your schedule for the next nine months in order to see and appreciate the adaptation. What is the turnaround time to revamp your form? Like, are there quick wins to be had here or is it a scenario where you're investing? It might take a while, but yeah, there's just going to be a lot of blood, sweat and tears involved.

Guest [00:53:31]: Yeah, I talked about how rewarding it is to work with runners and one of my favorite things to do is we'll do a gain analysis, right? We do this 90 minutes session. People come in and towards the last half an hour, what we're doing is we're getting them on the treadmill, we're assessing them, and I'll queue them and I'll spend five minutes doing drills with them, and I'll put them back on the treadmill and I'll change the running form. And they just get this, like, AHA moment. And they can see immediately, assuming that they don't have a lot of limitations in their mobility or in their strength, they can make a change pretty quickly. And I'll get them to run a little bit, they're like, wow, this feels different, this feels so different. And then part of what I do to train them of how to maintain that form is I ask them to go back to their old way. I say Run like you did before. Some refuse, some will take like a few steps and feel like and just look so appalled that they ever ran that way in their life. So my point in sharing that is like, there can be some immediate effects of it. What we see and the literature shows is that when you first change, it's going to actually be a little harder to do. And that's okay because you became efficient at the way that you were running, but that doesn't mean that's the. Most efficient way that you can run. So it takes about two to three weeks. And in that two to three weeks, what we see is you learn to reduce the muscle activity needed to recreate that form and that posture we're asking you to obtain in that form. So in that two to three week time, even my preferred, like, I've worked with Olympic medalists winners, like some of the fastest runners in the world, world record holders, national record holders, we worked with them. And guess what? Everyone does a walk run progression, no matter what level. If you're running 100 miles a week or 2 miles a week, you're going to do a walk run progression to let your body adapt to the change in stress. And that takes about two and a half to three weeks, depending on how quickly you want to go through that. So this is an important one that we understand there are some immediate benefits. You will feel a difference in about two to three weeks. You'll be able to really adjust to that. And we'll see. I bring people back typically when I do a gay analysis, I like to bring them back in ten to 14 days to give them a chance to get some feedback. I bring them back again in a month or at three months. And we don't always have to do that, but a lot of times we do and they retain it. People are doing it naturally and we can even fine tune it a little bit more, but the changes stick. I have people that come back to me years later and I can compare their gate analysis to when I first saw them to now, and they're able to make a lot of that. If they're focusing on they kept up with the drills and they're focusing on their form, they really can maintain these changes. But it's not a long term investment. In two to three weeks, you can see I just had somebody, a guy come in yesterday that told me he did an eight K, and he just felt like he put way less effort in and had a better result than he normally did. Like he said, a new PR. But he felt like I didn't feel like I was working that hard. And he had gone through about three weeks of the Gateway training program and it was just significantly easier for him to do. So this doesn't have to be an arduous process, but what I would say is that my hope and expectation would be that at least once a week, once you've gone through those three to four weeks of gate retraining, we should be focusing on a form at least once a week. It's not hard to do the first five minutes of your easy run, focusing on your form, paying attention to it. That's all you really have to do. So once you learn how to do this, there's not a whole lot of work that needs to be done on the back end to maintain it. We just need to make sure that you get that initial change in your form and then it's pretty easy with pretty minimal effort. Just doing some drills and once a week practicing your form while you're running and you'll maintain it really well.

Finn Melanson [00:57:38]: Doug, this has been an awesome conversation. You might have heard me typing. I was furiously taking notes all episode. I learned a ton. I'm sure listeners and viewers did as well. You're really at the front lines of all this in terms of practicality and helping all sorts of runners. Do you have any calls to action or links to interesting courses or services that this audience might appreciate to know about?

Guest [00:58:02]: Yeah, so if you love this stuff like I do, or even less degree there, you want to learn more about some of this. We do have a free course. It's an hour course and we designed it that it is for people that don't really have much of a background in running, mechanics and even anatomy and physiology. It gives some good insight. So we have a free it's an hour long essential elements of running course that we really recommend people take. I think that can be really helpful. For people, that's something that is helpful. We send helpful things out in our newsletter, so if you sign up for that course, you'll also get our newsletter. We're constantly send out articles and things like that. We work a lot with physical therapists, athletic trainers, chiropractors physicians, but that course is especially good for any book runner that's really interested in learning more about that. And then we do have a coaching course that we've gotten some really great feedback, kind of how we take a systematic approach to training and how we talk about developing running economy and the energy systems involved and how to create scientifically backed training programs based on that. So there is a really good endurance level, one endurance running coaching course that you can find about. But there's the free course as well. Happy to have people check out. And then we're run DNA systems we'll put up on Instagram saying we get some drills and things like that that we're posting and exercises. So check us out on social media as well. Love to hear from you and see. And then I would just really promote too. I think every runner should have a physical therapist or medical professional or a health professional or fitness professional that's really in their corner, helping them out for those things. Running can be very simple and easy and you can do a lot of it on your own, but you don't always have to. And having somebody in your corner that can give you some feedback is really helpful. So on our website we have a Find a provider. Like I said, there's been like 10,000 people that have gone through our courses in the medical and fitness industry, people that really are enthusiastic in learning about this. So if you are looking for some more information, we have a whole list of providers out there. You can search them and see who's in your area. You.

Finn Melanson [01:00:40]: Thanks for listening to the Run to the Top podcast. I'm your host.

Finn Melanson [01:00:43]: Finn milanson.

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