Running Drills That Will Benefit Your Running

Audio Transcript

Ally: Hi RunnersConnect! I have a question about walking drills. I was wondering if there’s any drills I can do while walking that would improve my running. I find that in a week, I do more walking than running, so I’d like to work on some things during my walks that would improve my running.

Thanks for the help.

Claire: What a creative question. I love the idea that you want to maximize the benefit of walking by adding in some form drills. The first step is to accept the fact that all running drills look and feel silly, okay?

Going down the street, hopping and skipping and lunging is bound to get some stares from the neighbors but that’s okay.

Even the best runners in the world look awkward and silly doing some of these drills, but they do them because they work and they make you stronger, fitter and faster.

Let’s go over some of the classic drills that you can do while walking down the street, or ones that you can do in your living room, in the privacy of your own home.

It’s a great idea to add them during your walk to get a little extra benefit from the time on your feet.

The first drill is simply, skipping. Skipping is going to increase your stride length, it’s going to help with your knee lift and it’s also going to improve your balance.

What you want to do is skip down the street, about 20 yards or so, rest and repeat. You want to do it forwards, rest and then do it backwards if you can.

It’s a little more difficult going backwards, so you can try doing the forwards first until you get the hang of it, then try going backwards and you might want to do it about two times each.

How you start a runners skip is to raise your knee up to about a 90-degree angle, and the raised foot should be about parallel to the ground.

You skip forward with a little jump on that lower leg if you can, and as you improve your skipping ability, you can do what’s called an ‘extended skip’.

When you bring your knee up, you kind of kick your lower leg forward as you skip forward. The center of your body moves across the ground, and you land with your foot underneath you, but it’s kind of a quick step before you take your next skip.

The second drill that I would recommend is called carioca and that has nothing to do with singing in a bar. It’s also called the grapevine. What you’re doing is moving laterally down the street to use muscles a little bit differently.

As runners, we’re always going in that forward plane. We don’t typically go side to side very often, so doing some drills that have you move laterally or side to side, is really good for opening up your hips and using some of the stability muscles that you normally neglect if you’re forever going simply in the forward direction.

The other thing that carioca does is it lessens your ground contact time because you’re using light quick steps.

The more practice you get using that little pitter patter step, the better your ground contact time will be which is to say, the shorter your ground contact time will be.

That means you’re going to break less as you run, which means you’re ultimately going to go faster and move a little easier, a little more efficiently.

How you do the grapevine or carioca is, you’re at about a skipping pace, so you were going laterally or to the side, crossing one foot in front of the other and then that foot goes behind the other.

You can go down about 20 yards or 20 meters and then switch legs and go back in the other direction. Or if you would like to continue going in the same direction down the street, make it a part of your run, just flip your body around so that you’re leading with a different foot each time.

You want to have your arms out to the side for balance, and your hips need to be kind of swivel motion. You’re hopping to the side and your hips are following the movement of your legs.

If you’re not quite up to a skipping pace, you can do this without the jump in it at all, and just do step side to side with one foot in front of the other, do the grapevine down the road.

The third set of drills is the hopping and jumping drills.

The first one is a double supported jump, and double supported is just a fancy way of saying, using both feet. You have two feet and you take a jump down the street. What that does is it strengthens your legs and it increases their stiffness.

If you have increased leg stiffness, it means that you’re going to have more stamina, and you’re going to tire out a lot later in the race or in the run than if you had weak leg stiffness.

What I want you to do is jump on both feet and you these can be little baby quick jumps. You can have these be bigger jumps. It’s completely up to what you’re feeling and what your ability is, but any kind of little hop or jump is going to provide benefit to you.

Again, like all these drills, maybe do about 20 yards down the road and take a little rest and repeat or turn around and go back in the same direction.

The next one is hopping on one leg, so you get all the benefits as jumping, but what hopping does is, it improves your balance. Basically, running is a series of hops – you’re hopping on one leg to the other.

If you practice an exaggerated form of that hopping down the road, it will improve all the muscles that you need to be an effective runner. Staying on one foot, I want you to hope down the road and maybe you want to do three hops and then walk three hops.

Switch legs, three hops on the other leg and then walk three hops. You don’t have to do all of these drills 20 yards and stop. You can just sprinkle them into your walk however you feel appropriate.

The last one is walking lunges. This one will take a little bit of strength to do. It’s not going to be the jumping kind of motion; it is going to be building your leg strength and your core strength as well as improving your balance.

What you want to do for the walking lunge is, lift one knee in an exaggerated step forward. Your knee is coming up parallel to the ground at about a 90-degree angle and then land with the knee still at that 90- degree angle. This is a slow motion lunge.

Then once you are in that stable position, use the glute muscle of the front leg as you pull the back leg forward, and then repeat that for about 20 yards or however many you feel is giving you a good workout.

The hard part of the walking lunge is doing it backwards. Yes, you can do this drill backwards.

Again, when we’re running, hopefully we’re not going backwards very often and because we don’t make that motion very often, some of the muscles that are used in the backwards motion aren’t worked enough.

Going backwards with the lunge is also very helpful to strengthen your legs.

Then of course you can do lunges laterally. Just like the forward lunge but you’re doing it to the side, go about 20 yards and turn around and come back or switch sides and keep going in the same direction.

There are probably about a million more running drills that you can do and sprinkle into your walk. Hopefully that gives you a good start and a good way to get stronger and faster while walking down the road.

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