On this episode of RunnersConnect, we explore various ways to improve running form and prevent injuries.
Our expert guest, Jay Dicharry, shares insights from his experience analyzing running patterns and addressing injuries as a physical therapist.
Jay’s going to discuss the most common issues we see when it comes to running form and injury, including the two most usual culprits of poor form and injury, posture and foot strike.
Plus, we’re going to get into building strength and power in your legs, the impact of different types of footwear on foot strikes and load on the body, and the role of glute muscles in running posture alignment.
Whether you’re a seasoned runner or just starting out, this episode has something to help you run stronger and with less injury risk.
Finn Melanson [00:00:14]: Hello fellow runners. I'm your host, Finn Milanson, and this is the Run to the Top podcast, the podcast dedicated to making you a better runner. With each and every episode, we are created and produced by the expert team of coaches@runnersconnect.net, where you can find the best running information on the internet, as well as training plans to fit every runner and every budget. In today's episode, we have the privilege of learning from one of the most respected biomechanical analysis researchers and practitioners, jay Deshari. For those that don't know, Jay is a physical therapist, biomechanics researcher, and author. Based out of Bend, Oregon, jay built his international reputation as an expert in biomechanical analysis. As director of the Speed Clinic at the University of Virginia, and as director of an independent lab in Oregon, jay blurs the lines between clinical practice, coaching, and engineering to solve injury problems and optimize performance. Jay literally wrote the book on running gate assessments. He is the author of Running Rewired and Anatomy for Runners, writes columns for numerous magazines, and has published over 35 professional journal articles and book chapters. In today's show, Jay is going to discuss the most common issues we see when it comes to running form and injury, including the two most usual culprits of poor form and injury posture and footstrike. Plus, we're going to get into building strength and power in your legs, the impact of different types of footwear on footstrikes and load on the body, and the role of glute muscles in running posture alignment. Let's dive 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%. If you're looking for the most effectively dosed electrolyte drink for runners, check out Element. It's loaded with everything you need to replenish your electrolyte balance, and you can get a free sample pack by going to drink Lmnt.com RunnersConnect.
Guest [00:02:38]: My name is Jada Sherry. I'm a physical therapist and got my start in this whole world working in a patient orthopedics for about six, seven years, and then basically wanted to find out if this stuff we're doing is actually making a difference and how we can really help runners better. So I'm directing the Motionalysis Lab at University of Virginia, and it was a really fun environment over there. We're the first place in North America that was able to kind of do both things. We looked at the clinical aspects of running injury prevention and performance, but also looked at objective analysis. So we had people coming in saying, I have an Ouch in my whatever, and then I could actually have data on that to figure out what's really driving that ouch. And then things became really interesting and more clear to me as far as how we treat running injuries. Because you had objective numbers on are the things we're doing, are the treatments and interventions that we're performing, actually improving stress to tissue or actually improving running economy, actually improving the way you move. And so I think that's been the building block of my career for the past decade and a half or so to try and really figure out what's causative, what's driving what, and it's taking us where we are today.
Finn Melanson [00:03:49]: Thanks for that intro. I love that you have the ability to combine the clinical aspect with the research aspect to really attack running form and injuries from a practical perspective. So this first question is more broad and then we'll hone in. What are some of the most common problems you see when it comes to running form and the runners you work with?
Guest [00:04:12]: I would say that most runners have body problems that they carry into their running form, but certainly some runners have just form problems in and of themselves. And when you look at form problems, I'm looking at things from a big picture level. I think running gate should be as least stressful as possible. So you think about you want to quantify a stress per stride, running should be as economical as possible and running should be as symmetric as possible. Let's say you came in with pretty good mobility and stability for a runner or for any type of athlete, but you just have some form issues because either you haven't been really given good cues on form work or you're relatively new to running, or you have somebody who told you some poor cues in the past. Ten years ago, you've still had coaches saying everyone should land heel to toe all the time, always. And then you had the opposite swing saying everybody must land their forefoot for all the time. It's like neither one of those strategies are correct, right? So I think that one of the biggest things I see play out is not so much where on the foot someone strikes. I don't really stress too much about forefoot, rear, foot, midfoot, but I think the biggest problem I see is that people tend to have their foot contact too far in front of their body, right? So the classic overstride definition, again, it's not the fact you're heel striking or midfoot striking, or forefoot striking, but when that contact, whatever type you use, occurs too far in front of the body, that really overloads the knees, right? And so the patel Fermal pain is one of the biggest. It's always one of the top three pain sites for runners in every single study you see. And the knee cap is a pulling mechanism, right? It transfers leverage around the quad. And if you tend to contact with leg to your arm for the body, you're going to ask those muscles to work too hard. And that does a number of things right. From the dorky science world I live in, we quantify what's driving this and what's driving that. I can tell you if you overstride, you wind up screwing up like 55 different things, right, just from that one problem. So you can call it a loading rate problem. You can cause an increase in the fragile plane knee torque. I mean, you can use these fancy words but the reality is if you contact two fronts throughout the body, the knees under more stress each and every stride and we want to try and bring that back, right? You want to bring the foot contact back closer to the body so that you can unload the knee. Now, that also has the confounding effect of increasing stress on the shin, right? So think about contact. You have a certain amount of stress to kind of lower the foot down to the ground and if you overstride, you've got more stress to lower the foot down to the ground. You have control. So I always tell people, why not just take that away, right? Why not just work on getting the foot close to the body? So that means the shin muscles are under less load. Posture in the back plays a huge problem as far as everything's gone. A foot strike, foot strike. Again, not to be a dead horse, but that's all people seem want to talk about and posture is huge and again, that can be a running form problem for sure because if you don't have enough mobility to kind of have your legs swing equally kind of front to back, right? So if you're tighten the hips in the backside at stride length instead of kind of going more equal front and more equal back tends to be more out in front of you. And so people can kind of compromise their low back position or it can be just the fact that most people tend to have pretty poor posture in general and so they carry that into where they run. But low back pain and running is never a great thing and so most people just tend to run overarched all the time and all that impact stress we have in running goes straight up into your low back. So that's another thing where you take people with chronic low back pain for ages and you basically just show them how to find neutral and they run like, oh, my back pain is gone. So it's pretty nice and simple that way.
Finn Melanson [00:08:01]: That makes a lot of sense. On a related note, one of the questions we get a lot is what role do shoes play when it comes to running mechanics and injuries? And more specifically the change in shoe technology to more low or zero drop heel heights.
Guest [00:08:19]: When you have, let's say, footwear from 1520 years ago, most footwear have a call two to one geometry. So the rear foot was twice as high as a forefoot, right? So you've got the slope running this way and so also had a lot of cushion, a lot of stuff shoved in the shoes, different proprietary kind of technologies on footwear and for sure those put your foot in a different environment than being barefoot, right? I mean, everybody can feel it's pretty easy to tie your shoes with your bare hands and you put gloves on and things are very disorganized. I have a hard time feeling what I'm doing. So if you take away sensory input to the body, you certainly change the way we move, right? It's interesting to me, as we started doing all these experiments, the barefoot running came into vogue and looking at what happens, right? So you take somebody with a bunch of cushion under their heel and you let them run and they will contact on their heel. But for whatever reason, let's not worry about why it started but let's just say you allowed them to contact. That way if you take it away and go to nothing, what you wind up is it hurts to contact pretty hard on your heel. So most runners, not everybody, but the vast majority of runners will not contact on their heel. They will adopt more of a forefoot type contact and that's held up pretty well for all the literature and all the things I've seen. The interesting thing is when you put a very minimal shoe, right, and this could be a lot of the ones we had kind of up there with zero drop with maybe just like a tiny bit of cushion, right? Like a few millimeters of cushion or maybe some just had a piece of foam rubber or blown rubber, different types of types of material. But now you had a little something and not a lot of something, but you didn't have barefoot and so some runners could adapt that very well, meaning that the way that affected their foot strike didn't actually cause a big jarring impact on contact, right? Some did have a big drawing contact on impact because I changed that purpose of the feel, right? So I didn't give myself direct skin the ground contact that said oh, don't let my heel but I also didn't put enough cushioning between myself and the ground to really dampen the load of having a heavy heel strike. So I think that's where things went up at an interesting time because you had people come out and saying oh, these shoes are saved my life and some people are saying they're killing me. The people who are saying they're saved my life likely were making changes in their footstrike that were beneficial to overall gait. And the people who had problems with those are the ones who kept trying to use their hill strike they've had for x number of years and just basically landing way too hard now. So I think that's one of the big things that kind of got lost in that whole shift of evolution of footwear.
Finn Melanson [00:11:05]: So most of it comes down to how we can combine our own personal mechanics with footwear to reduce the overall impact force put it this way, if.
Guest [00:11:16]: You think about a certain amount of load occur to your body when you run, that's a given, right? So the question of foot strike becomes how do you disperse that load? Right? So the total load is not going to change, but you can slow it down with more of a four foot contact. In some cases, that may be advantageous to minimize impact stress. Okay. Certain injuries we have related to high impact stresses, for sure. Certain injuries we have have nothing to do with impact stresses. So it depends on what's driving. What if you've got somebody who's got an older runner who has their meniscus removed either due to trauma or overuse, whatever, you've got less material there inside the need to cushion the impact foot contact. And so adopting a forefoot strike is actually a really good strategy to minimize that stress. Okay. But what I would say is if you now look at the effect on economy, you're sort of in a little bit of a catch 22 because sometimes not all the time, but sometimes that additional four foot contact can actually increase the total work of running. And so people usually want to get faster and stave off injuries, not just have one or the other. So I would say if you overstrive with a four foot contact, you're definitely robbing Peter to pay Paul. Okay. If you contact close to your body with a four foot strike, things can look just fine, just like they would with a midfoot contact close to the body and a rear foot contact close to the body. So again, I would say that four foot contact does have a change in effect. But if a lot of runners, because most of the problem we see in strap mechanics are not down at the feet, they're actually up in the spine and the hips in terms of poor posture and poor hip drive. And if you just take that same recipe and throw a forefoot contact on it, you'll land softer, but you're going to work harder to do that.
Finn Melanson [00:13:07]: Got you. So the real changes need to come from the hip and glutes and not so much from the feet or trying to control how our feet strike.
Guest [00:13:16]: So when you look at the foot and ankle, right, so muscles in the feet are very tiny and they're very important for kind of steering the foot down to the ground. We have to kind of adapt to the ground and stabilize a good foundation. But I think you use this analogy, muscles in the feet tell us what to do. Okay. Muscles up on the hip actually do most of the work. Right. So as running speed increases, more and more and more percentage of that propulsion drive needs to come from hip muscles. Right. So two things going on here. Yes. The Achilles tendon is a big spring and that spring is on the foot. And so you can think about this. If the foot is in a poor position, that spring is now in a poor position. I always tell people if you're a spring, you want to cross a bridge or across a truss, right? You want to cross the truss that's nice and stable. You don't want to cross the truss that's blown in half, right? So poor foot control can certainly compromise the mechanics of the Achilles tendon, and they can really screw up your elasticity as you run. But the big, bulky muscles that really do most of the drive work for us are up at the hips. The hip muscles have three functions, right? And this gets overlooked a lot. The glute muscles should do number one. They should propel us, right? So by definition of extension is driving the hip back behind the body, right? So if we're running towards this way, we're driving the hip back behind the body so that they do extension. But they also control the rotational alignment of your leg. They kind of steer your leg. And the foot muscles aren't really doing most of this work, right? They're just too small and don't have leverage. But your hip muscles do. And you think about that whenever you see people running that classic picture of their knee kind of diving in as they're running. You're not seeing a two dimensional problem. What you're seeing is a twisting problem, right? There's too much inward rotation of the leg. So in a flat picture, it looks like the knee is diving in in a peripheral plane. Mechanics what's actually happening as the knees twisting in and your glute muscles basically control that twist. And you always want to make sure you keep your parts aligned as you're running, not having things wobble too much side to side because that causes a lot of the instability injuries we see with running. That's number two function. Number three function is they have a huge effect on posture alignment, right? So you can think about if you have sort of two objects here, right? So you've got if this is my torso and this is my hip down below, the hip muscles will drive my hip from in front of me to back behind my body, right? That's pretty easy to see. People get that point. But the flip side of this is that muscles also work inversely. So if here's my hip and it's basically controlling things pretty well, the pull generated in the backside here will help keep my torso basically stable, right? And if my glute muscles tend to get fatigued or inhibited, what happens is runners adopt too much of a four lean. And so I've got too much of a four lean. Now my stride shifts even further forward because I'm about to fall on my face. So poor hip control drives posture problems, which then forces it overstrides what my book, Anatomy Runners, I call is a Toilet Bowl of Doom. You're kind of stuck in this position where your posture is basically forcing you to overstride. You can't stop overstriding because you don't know how to fix it. Your glute is not firing. So it's this big kind of downward spiral, and you have to go back and kind of rebuild the runner from ground up. So I would say that in summary, I would say that foot muscles are important. They provide a good foundation to Achilles tendon. But as you want speed to increase, more of that drive has to come from those muscles up top. They provide drive functions, stability functions, and postural functions. And that's why it's there. That's why that's the king we should all be working on.
Finn Melanson [00:16:46]: So when runners look at improving form, they should be approaching it from two perspectives improving strength and eliminating inhibitions. Or is there one that's more important than the other?
Guest [00:16:57]: It's both. Yeah. So I think that the word I like to use when I look at runners. I like to find out, do you have an inhibition problem or do you have a strength problem? And those are not just semantics. So if you're making toast today and you plug in your you know, you put your put your bread in the toaster and you come back. If it's not toasted, you don't just shove more bread in the toaster, right? First thing you do is figure out, geez, the toaster plugged in right? Did I just do that correctly today? So if things aren't inhibited right. Excuse me? If things are inhibited, we wind up with is it's not to say you can't fire the muscle. There's always semantics in there. But it's to say that when you run, the way we move actually occurs below our brain. It's called a brain stem. And so it's kind of automatic. And what we talk about when things are inhibited is the normal way we run. Our general running form, which has that pattern of recruiting those muscles, isn't in that running form, right? And so we have to kind of take a step back and say, okay, let's teach somebody how to integrate this new muscular muscle control. It's not muscle. I would say movement control, because we don't just train one muscle. We're always training groups of muscles. But how do we train this group of muscles to fire together to actually change the way we're running? And that's where this definitely comes full circle.
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Guest [00:20:46]: If you look at you can look at this a few different ways. Scientific Standpoint was a great study by Roger Cramm and Jack Taylor done many years ago. And what they did was they put every runner or every person in the study within a lock knee brace so you could just look at just the ankle and kind of take on some confounding variables out of things. But they put vo two systems on them and had them jump, right? And they had those runners jump at different cadences and just look at what's the most efficient cadence to bounce not to run, just to bounce up and down. And what they found was the most efficient cadence happened to be around 180, right? And so people are like, oh, well, that says that everything needs to be 180. I would say a few problems with that. Efficiency doesn't always equal performance, okay? And secondly, if you don't like science and you just look at the world of coaching well, records have been run with cadences between 178 and 212. So that's a pretty wide range if you're somebody who comes in comes and see me with a cadence of 156, for sure, cadence is going to be something we're focusing on. If you come see me with a cadence of 177, I'm not going to sweat the detail there of three steps per minute. Okay. Plus, your cadence changes with intensity, changes with surface, changes with shoe stiffness, changes with a bunch of factors. So I would say if you look at things in that 180 standpoint, if you're within 1015 percent of that, great. You're doing a great job. And if you do want to change your cadence, then the right thing to do is to not go from, oh, I'm at 156, I'm going to try and hit 180 because that's too much change for your body. There's been some great work from my friends. Brian Heidercheit's group looked at effective ways to transfer in a higher cadence work. And if you focus on a 5% to 10% change at a time, that's a much better option, right. So if you're trying to increase I used to be a 157. Now I'm going to aim for 161. Let me work on that for a few weeks. Okay, great. That's my new set cadence. Right now I'm going to aim for 164 and 65. And so you gradually make that transition. That's a safe way to do this because again, you're not just forcing some aberrant value, you're trying to change your brain's. Kind of like set pattern as far as how quickly you'll turn over. So that's one piece and the stride length piece. I will say that the wrong thing to do is to try and force the stride length. The right thing to do is to build a better strength base to make sure that you can achieve better stride length through increasing stiffness in your legs, not trying to just force a certain turnover. So this gets in the question where people say, oh, does that mean I have to go to the gym? You don't have to unless you want to get faster. There's overwhelming proof that doing the right amount of strength and power moves for running is dramatically effective. Yeah, for a second, I keep using this pin, but it works pretty well. So if you think about running, right? So if you contact the ground and you basically contact imagine the spring inside my pen here, right, is basically storing energy and then it's releasing energy to push off. And so you want to think about what we can do to make this spring bigger inside this pen, right. So if you have a bigger spring, that means that you get a faster storage and release off the ground. And that comes from basically two primary things. One is we need to train runners to put more force down to the ground. A great paper by Peter Wayne a long time ago basically said title of paper is literally runners that put more force down the ground and more economical. And it's pretty simple. If you drive more force down to the ground, that spring compresses and rebounds bigger. So I then have more airtime before I come down from next stride. So you've increased drive length the right way. Okay. So it's worth your time to focus on exercises that help you put more force down the ground. So traditional squats, traditional deadlifts. Deadlifts are my favorite exercises because it puts up more of a postural component and it's a little straighter, safer for the knees. A big fan of doing straight legged deadlifts. There's like a million videos on YouTube if you want to look at these things up. But look up Romanian deadlift or straight legged deadlift, it's hardly any knee stress. And it's a great way for runners to again get more drive from the hips by putting more force down the ground. There's 900 exercises we could talk about, but those are important when you look at the second opponent. So number one is gen driving more force down the ground. Second component of this is going to be to we call rate of force development. So if you think about running, you're not in contact with the ground very long, right? Most runners are in contact with the ground by a quarter second or less. And so when you go to the gym and if you're doing like, say a squat and you're taking 3 seconds to come up, you're training max strength, right? But that's training in a way that's not very relevant to running because when you run, you have to apply that force very quickly, right? So what I like to do is get runners a nice solid strength base. First of all, that may take between six weeks and a year, literally. If you're a runner who's never touched weights before, I would much rather you spend time doing more controlled, slower movements. Even though it may seem contradictory, I'm about to say, but you're going to learn to move better because time is your friend, right? I'm not going to force you to jump super quick and fall apart. Because the biggest problem I see with this trend of plyometrics, which are great exercises, people think plyometrics is aimlessly bouncing around the room, all over the place, and they wind up getting hurt because they take again that same problem of instability, and they just throw a bunch more load at it and they say plyometrics hurt them. No, plyometrics didn't hurt you. The way you control your body hurt you and then you just threw more activity at it. So, rate of force development exercises help you put more force down the ground in a shorter period of time. Box jumps, split legged jumps there's, bounds uphill there's a bunch of great ways to improve that rate of force development, but I put those in after the runner has a really good foundation in strength work because you have to know how to move, because again. Every time you ask your body to do something very quickly, you don't have time to think. So you have to have enough muscle memory to draw from to say, okay, I know I'm moving safely first to be able to build a better mouse trap.
Finn Melanson [00:26:51]: That was awesome. That gave me a lot of ideas already. Let's move up the body now, though, to talk a little bit about arm swing. How important is arm swing, in your opinion, and how do we know if it's even something we should be working on?
Guest [00:27:05]: Yeah. And this is kind of fun, right? You can just take a video of yourself if you want to. Your arm swing can tell you a lot about your problems. Let's break Armstrong down to three sort of components. So when you're watching somebody run and they tend to have arm strength very wide, right? So that's basically telling you, I have some type of lateral control problem, right. So I'm wobbly so I just put my arms out to give me more stability. Okay. Those of you who are trail runners, you go down steep downhills. We all do. What this? We put our arms out to get more control, and a lot of runners do that just running on the sidewalk, right. So when you see elbows come out wide, it's telling you, I have a lateral plane problem somewhere. So you want to try from a self diagnostic standpoint, let's figure out where that's coming from. The second problem I see is we have arm swing that crosses over too far in front, and so that's telling you, I have a rotational control problem somewhere, okay? Could be down at the foot, could be up at the hips, could be in the spine. I don't know. Right. But you have some instability, and so that's why your arm swing is crossing too far over in front of you. So that's another kind of diagnostic to say, hey, I want to fix this. Right. But the one I think is really kind of fun for runners to work with is the front to back aspect of your swing. So, again, you don't run with your arms, but if your arm swing tends to come forward, what happens is if I'm too forward on one side, that kind of cues my brain to counterbalance by contacting with my opposite leg far in front as well. Right. So if your arm swing tends to be more in front of your body, okay, that kind of can I wouldn't say force by any means, but that sort of like, allows you to kind of go into your overstrip mechanics on and on. I tell people, pretend that you're running along, you drop a plate glass right in front of you as you run, right. And so you don't want to let that arm swing go basically in front of the plate glass. So you want to keep your arm swing more back behind you than in front of you. That's a great way to kind of give your brain a signal to sort of tighten up where your foot contacts in relation to your body. And we've beat that a bunch of times so far today, but it's a great way to try and help Cue a shortened stride in front of the body. Those of you who have track experience, I tell people when you're running, just pretend you're elbowing the guy behind you on the track, right, with your arm. If you think about getting the arm back behind you, it's going to fall back down again, right? You shouldn't have to swing forward with your arm swing. We're not sprinting when distance running, right? So your arms is there to kind of balance our body. If you focus more on the backside of the arm swing, that'll really help you get more control of the backside of your legs, too.
Finn Melanson [00:29:29]: Makes total sense. So how should we as runners think about approaching and improving our form?
Guest [00:29:38]: Put this way, if you're left handed, I'm left handed, okay? I can write really easy with my left hand, right? If you ask me to write my name with my right hand, I can, but it's way harder because it's not as automatic. Okay. And that's why I think I like to get runners to understand that concept of we're sort of wired, right? We have this software program we've written to run with our current form, and if you want to modify that program, you certainly can, right? You can practice. Let's say you're a four foot runner, you will land your heels. You can do that, right? If you want to increase the stride length, you can do that. But it takes more cognitive effort to do this. So the time to focus on run retraining is not during your next five k, okay? The time to focus on run retraining is when you can focus on your stride and not worry about splits. So I think that if you're trying to change things, let's make them simple and let's make them at a time when I can digest and feel and process it.
Finn Melanson [00:30:31]: Totally agree. I like the concept of rewiring your brain. To finish this up, though, talk us through some of the mental cues you.
Guest [00:30:40]: Like to use with respect to what cues are helpful. I think we'll just do a few of them here to give a bunch of them but a few examples in terms of propulsion, right? So one of the keys I use is a shopping cart cue. If you think about you're having a party and you've got 300 pounds of food and beer in your shopping cart, if you have to make that cart move, you can't just lift your leg up and put it in front of you, right? You can't pull the body along. And again, a lot of runners think they want to lift and reach with their legs to get the shopping cart. To move, you have to push back, right? With the muscles around the hips and the backside of the hips. And so one of the things I will tell runners is you're running. Imagine you're actually pushing a super heavy shopping cart in front of you. Try this. Go to the grocery and again, put your heavy cart, just lift your leg up and notice it doesn't work. You have to actually push the cart in front of you. And so keep that visual in mind is a great way to make sure that you're always driving and thinking about pushing yourself along versus pulling yourself along. That's one key, like a lot that arm swing cue we talked about as far as bringing that arm swing more back behind you than in front of you. Again, think about just kind of driving the elbow back. You're jabbing, just relax it forward, right? It'll naturally sink down. Jabbing back, let sink down. That's a good one. In terms of rotational alignment, which is huge in runners, I always tell folks, imagine your kneecaps as flashlights, right? Your left leg is yellow flashlight. Your right leg is a blue flashlight. Don't cross your beams and make green, right? For those of you who tend to have a lot of wobble and stability in your gate, that's a great thing to focus on. I like that one a ton. I think other cues that work well are think about being long from the back of the neck with regards to posture. A lot of runners take a body which is very kind of crumpled from upper body, right? And so our natural tendency then just is to arch and kind of cheat my low back position, which grew things up. So if you can think about lengthening the back of the neck, it's a great way to kind of pull the whole spine elongated. That's a good one. Especially, it's nice for going uphill because you think about people, everybody leans forward into an uphill, which is great, but we tend to kind of slump into it. I want to make sure we can actually stay long through the uphill. That's a nice one. I also like from the standing posture assessment, too, I think it's great just to think about where that balance point is. So during your runs, go ahead and just stop. So you stay on one leg. And I want everybody to think about where your foot you feel your body. And most runners, again, will have a lot of contact on their heel. And I'm not talking about heel strike, I'm just talking when you're standing, most runners will have more of their weight back on their heels. A great thing to do is to put one hand, your belly button, one hit up on your sternum, on your chest, on your breastbone, and drop your breastbone slightly forward into the point where you feel weight shift more to the middle part of the foot. Right? And just kind of pay attention to what that feels like and try and run with that position and run another half a mile and stop again and think about, where is my body, right? Am I still in the midfoot position? Awesome. Am I now back on my heels again? Let's bring that chest back forward again. So we're not talking about leaning from the back. We're talking about changing my mid spine position to make sure I can keep my body weight over my center mass. That's a huge one. That, again, can fix a number of problems by itself.
Finn Melanson [00:33:53]: Wow. That was an awesome breakdown and some very helpful cues. I think we can all implement in our training right away. Thanks for being so thorough with that's. Thanks for listening to the Run to the Top podcast. I'm your host. Finn milanson. As always, our mission here is to help you become a better runner with every episode. Please consider connecting with me on Instagram at Wasatch, Finn, and the rest of our team at Runners Connect. Also consider supporting our show for free with a rating on the Spotify and Apple podcast players. And lastly, if you love the show and want bonus content, behind the scenes experiences with our guests, and premier access to contests and giveaways, then subscribe to our newsletter by going to RunnersConnect. Net podcast. Until next time, happy training.
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