Most of us have finisher pics and mid-race photos but not many of us have footage of themselves running. Sometimes, a picture reveals clues about ways to improve your running form but if you really want to know... You guessed it, you must have footage of you running.
Many runners have bad running habits. Habits that make running hard on the body. Injury-inducing bad habits. 70% of emerging runners develop an injury in the first year of training. That is a staggering statistic (and not in a good way).
But shouldn't the act of running be easy for us?
Didn't our ancestors evolve by running across the savannah chasing gazelles and running away from lions? Shouldn't it be as easy as pie for us to run?
Photo by Nishant Aneja from Pexels
It's true that we have been gifted with the ability to walk, jog, run and sprint by our ancestors. We all are born with the motor-neuron patterns (software) of these movements already downloaded into our hardware (brain). We just need to learn how to fire the muscles appropriately and away we go!
Roughly 10,000 years ago we discovered (much to the relief of the gazelles) that you could simply grow your food rather than chasing after it. We stopped hunting prey through a technique called ‘persistence running’. Although tasty, being able to bake pies from the wheat we grow has an unfortunate by-effect: we stopped using the motor-neuron pattern of running.
And if there is one rule in exercise that we all know it is this one: If you don’t use it, you lose it.
If you want to start using the running pattern again, you have to awaken it from the brain. And just like learning how to play the piano, it might take some practice before you get comfortable with it. You may even have to unlearn some bad habits.
Whether you start with running or want to improve your performance, running form enhancement is key to success. And as with any journey, it helps to know where you start. Knowing what in your running stride goes well and which improvements you should focus on, gives you a roadmap to success. And no better way than to have visual feedback with numbers to help interpret what you see in front of you.
The Effortless Running™ method helps you to gain a smooth, fast, powerful, and injury-free running form. To find out what you should focus on, we use the MotionMetrix system in our Effortless Running Lab. This state-of-the-art markerless video analysis system uses depth cameras to allow quality motion data to be obtained without the use of body markers. captures your running form faster than ever. From the video data report we then determine a unique runner profile that allows prediction of speed performance, alignment, injury susceptibility, primary injury sites, and much more.
Having a video analysis fast-tracks your running form enhancement. It is the ideal starting point for your running transformation. Your Effortless Running coach will be able to interpret the data together with you and prescribe the corrective drills that are most appropriate for you and your running form. From there on out, you are on your way to a perfect running form!
We would love to have you visit our Effortless Running Lab in Phuket for a video analysis of your running form. Book an appointment here or check out the online offerings of the Effortless Running training plans and/or running form enhancement plans.
Happy training!
Erik Bohm - Effortless Running - July 2021
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