10 Minutes to Fix Your Running Form

how fast could you run if you fixed your running form the simple answer is that you would run faster for longer with less effort and few injuries so in this video I'll show you how to tell if your running form is incorrect the most common running form mistakes and exactly how to fix your own running form I'm also going to show you why most people who talk about running form miss a critical step which can make all the difference now I'm Nicholas a former professional athlete physiotherapist and Elite performance specialist so how quickly can you

expect to see improvements in your running form if you follow the steps that I'm about to show you you can see improvements immediately but you might find it a bit hard at first that's because your body is optimized to running the way you are right now which for me at first at least was more like Frankenstein's monster than you say B so when you fix your running form you're going to go through a short period of adjustment before it becomes natural and easy but if you improve your running form you're going to to run faster

with less effort with less injuries and you're going to set new personal bests so let me show you a simple yet extremely powerful way to find out if your running form is less than optimal to begin with but before we can talk about correcting our running form we need to Define what a good running form even is to begin with and here is my take on it a good running form minimizes the resistance that you need to overcome and maximizes the force that propels you forward any energy that is spent on not making you go

forward in the direction you want is wasted energy and I like to look at it from a straight biomechanical View and not from a galaxy far far away all right with that set in stone let me show you exactly how to assess yourself and improve every single aspect of your running form all right so this is a video of me how I ran back in the day now it's filmed recently but you know educational purposes so whenever I look at running forms I like to start from the Fe and then work my way off to

make things easy for you let me just quickly go over four things that I usually see when I'm correcting running form like this from the side the first thing is thy flexion in the ankle it's great for sprinters not for endurance athletes if you look at the feet only then you can see right here on the right that whenever I hit the ground which is right about there and then if we look on the left when I hit the ground around here now if we look at my feet they are dorsal flexed on the right

which means that they are pointing upwards and that creates a force against me there on the other hand when we look at the left you can see that the force against me is actually not there from the feet some people say that you need to do a dorsal flexion I don't agree unless you are a sprinter there's some different biomechanics there but if you do longdistance running then most people would just get shin splints if they start to do the dorsal Flex so I would just relax your feet relax the lower part of your leg

until right before you H hit the ground if you look at the the left side here I try to relax my feet and then just as I hit the ground I start to uh flex and uh and and use my muscles and that's because when you are running a long distance you want to reserve as much energy as possible and then again if you overstride like I do on the right side here then you are creating some force that you have to overcome so that's the first thing so let me quickly go over the heel

strike midfoot versus for foot I don't really care if you land right underneath your body then you can be a heel foot Striker you can be a midfoot striker you can be a for foot Striker it won't matter that much because the force created against you will not be that much because you are landing right underneath that center of gravity one thing I will say though is that most people that I've ever coached and I've seen who are for foot Runners they tend to have a lot of Achilles issue because it's a lot of force

that their Achilles tendon has to overcome at each step so in my opinion the best way to land is midfoot but people are built different so sometimes it can be better to do something else most elite Runners are midfoot Runners and if you want to geek out more about foot mechanics I made a whole other video where I show you exactly how the the feet are supposed to land and I even had a gate analysis so you can check that out if you want the next thing is big toe dorsy flexion this is why most

people have a hole in the top of their shoe it's because they do the dors flexion of the feet or the toes and it has no purpose other than just spending energy and ruining your shoes so if that's your issue you need to do some uh training for your feet and it could be H just like neuromuscular control so that you can lift your feet or your um toes independently of each other the next thing is your feet Landing in front of your body H they should land just underneath you or close to and a

great thing to think about when you're trying to learn this is to think in your head that they should land behind you trust me they won't but if you just think okay I need to land behind my uh mid- center of gravity then that will help you get closer to that midline next common mistake I see is no knee drive and here's where most people go wrong because they think that like Elite athletes they need to kicks in the butt but this is an illusion you see when athletes run really really fast they knee drive

and because they relax in the lower leg then it works sort of like a whip so it's not that they trying to kick themselves in the butt it's because they have such a high knee drive and it works like a a whip the next thing I see is no extension at the hip keep your body upright and extend your hip as as far way back as you can so that you Propel yourself forward which brings me to the one thing that most coaches ignore when they analyzing running form and I don't know why because it

could make all the difference let me just say this anyone who say they can fix your running form or correct your running form only looking at you from the side they don't know what they're doing and let me show you why now this is a look at me from behind running and as you can see I can see a lot of things that I could not see when I look from the side so the first thing if we look at the feet we can see that whenever I hit the ground I have sort of a

super foot now it's okay to have your feet are designed to have sort of a bit of a subnation and then going into a bit of a pronation when you go over your big toe but that's the first thing the next thing is that I can see my knees and I can see that they are sort of going up against each other if you can see they are very very very close to each other and that's because I have a bit of an tendency to inward rotate at my hip this is not good I need

to work on this I need to work on my outward rotation and be more stable the next thing is that you can see right at my hip if you look at the degrees here you can see that when I land it's not a 90° angle it's not it's not even a 90° angle at any any point in time in fact I tend to have a much higher right hip than a left hip and I want want this to be as aligned as possible so I need to work on this and these things you can't see

them when you're looking at your view from the side so it's very important that whenever you fix your running form you have a side view and you have a frontal view like this one or from the front and then also have one of your feet so you can see exactly what's happening there again to make things easy for you let me just quickly go over the things that I usually see and that we usually need to correct so the first mistake I often see is the arms and I often see them uh going over the

midline we don't want that because that's creating force in a direction we don't want so that's going to create force that way and that way we don't want that so we want it to be on either right side or left side not crossing the midline most people say then where should I have them and I just say wherever it feels natural so bend your elbow at 90° or above and then just have it where it feels natural so it depends on how your scapula or how your shoulder is built but don't think that you have

to have them out like here or in here just have it where where it feels natural so the next mistake I usually see is the trelan Bor sign and that means that when you land on your feet your hip will will sort of go out to that side or to that side and that uh means that you need to work on the strength of your hip because of course that is also creating force in a direction that is not helping us Propel forward then the last thing I usually see here is feet that are crossing

the center line so if we look at me here we are right around the center line here so often I see people actually Crossing that midline and that creates a lot of force against and especially on the hip and if you tend to have issues on the outside of your hip or the outside of your knee it could be because of this so it means that you need to work on hip abduction and the strength here now I know that this can seem like a lot and where do you even begin so let me show

you a powerful hack when it comes to running form using this hack has helped more Runners than I can count and it's just one of those things where if you do it right most of the other things they correct themselves are you ready for it try to film yourself and then increase your steps by 10% and then film yourself again I promise you most of the time you'll find that most of the things that we just discussed they have just magically disappeared because you increased your Cadence and that's incredible from just focusing on one thing

but fixing your running form is only half of the equation now you need to learn how to train correctly to run faster with less effort and you can learn exactly how to do that in this video right [Music]