Guys -- I'm desperate and about to quit running, because for the love of god I cannot fix my hip drop / pelvic drop (on both sid

I will return to running, but I'm just so frustrated that nothing seemed to work. I know 4 months is not enough, but I expected to see SOME changes. It seemed impossible to me from the very beginning that strength training alone magically is going to fix my pelvic drop collapse mid run. This cannot work like this, right? I feel like I need gait retraining or whatever this is to see changes, not gym time alone

Certain muscles may get weak because they are not being used at the right time. But I agree with you about gait. If gait needs to change, it's like ditching a bad habit. Need frequent repeated reminders to get back on track. In fact, better to only run when you are doing it the way you want to do it, so you are only reinforcing good habit. Lots of suggestions in the thread. Try barefoot? Short hills? Can you feel it if your hips start dipping? Is it better when you are going faster? I know my form changes when I run slow, and it's not always good. Or attach some jingle bells to your waist to tell you if the hips are dipping? It's getting closer to that season. )

If you're near Oregon (Eugene), I'd recommend Chris Whetstine. The guy's amazing.

Are you sure it's the running form that is causing your injuries? I think my form is far worst than yours. And many people in local running clubs have it even worst. I don't really see any problem with your form. It's not suppose to be perfect or completely symmetrical. You can see even in elites they have imbalances.

Jae Grunke's video series have fixed or improves all kinds of things for me:

My 2 cents:

I think you could work on your hip and IT band flexibility and strength, that is, work on rotating your hip outward to order to prevent it rotating inward and collapsing down. Work on the right leg more than the left, seems more of a problem that side - though its hard to tell. You look to be leaning a bit on your left because of it. Continuing to run without addressing this issue just makes it worse.

As your develop the strength and flexibility to rotate your hip/thigh outward, your knees and feet will corresponding straighten up and fall more in line with the direction of your running - eliminating your knew pain and the need for orthotics (which are usually just a fix for issues higher up the leg). And you will go faster.

I have had problems worse than yours and have done this and it helped immensely. The idea is try push you hips in the direction of bow leggedness, especially on the side that is least inclined to go that way.

I developed my own more targeted versions of these two kind of exercises

healthsciences.unimelb.edu.au

Hip External Rotation Exercises

Hip External Rotation Exercises

Open link

eg. Hip stretch: find a ledge about belly button height or just below. Lift one foot on it, with 90 degree bend in your leg try to push knee down as so flat as possible (be careful).

Something like this though standing up straighter and in situation that allows you to flex that knee a low as possible, ie below horrizontal:

rehabhero.ca

Figure 4 Table Stretch — Rehab Hero

David Song

FIGURE 4 TABLE STRETCH The figure 4 table stretch is used to stretch the hip internal rotators and hip extensors. Start by place your leg on an elevated stable surface like a table, bed, or bench. Bend the knee past 90 degree...

Open link

For strength work I use a pretty thick stretching band, using thicker bands to progressively add resistance to to rotating the leg outward. Hook the band over and between both knees, lie on the floor on your side, knees 90 degrees. Find a way to anchor the bottom knee down with a heavy weight or stick under small at the bottom of your couch or something. Then lift and rotate the knee of the top leg (this is mostly going to be your right knee I think) upward/outward as far you can while keeping your ankles together. Hope that all makes sense.

I reckon you're overthinking it.

Go to any fun run or road race and 80% of the participants will have worse form and far quirkier biomechanics.

Sure, you overpronate a little bit, and there does seem to be quite a bit of width between where each foots strikes the ground (my suspicion is that this is due to a low cadence, but it's hard to tell in slow motion).

If you're not injured now, then don't stress about it. Keep doing your strengthening routine, and maybe buy some shoes with a bit more stability and slightly more cushioning (for easy days).

All runners have weaknesses in their mechanics that they constantly have to work on in order to stay injury free. There will never be a time where everything will be 100% sound, and you'll be able to handle infinite amounts of training.

OP, was this a ruse to get LR to look at your junk? With reference to your vids

What this guy said, but I'd give the opposite advice re: shoes. If you're only running on a treadmill, get yourself a pair of Skinners. They're like sock-shoes and allow you to run 'barefoot' without trashing the skin on your feet. I use them on treadmills all the time, so no durability issues. Running without random wedges of foam under your feet will hopefully allow you to understand what your 'natural' running form is as well as improve your proprioception. More importantly, it will hopefully allow you to 'let go' of all of these preconceptions in your head about what causes your running niggles. As a few people above have pointed out, there are a tonne of runners out there running fast and injury-free with much worse running form than you have.

Lol, he's ignoring every comment that suggests he might be clueless about his form. Keep filming yourself buddy...

Respectfully, I cannot agree with this. I keep getting injured over and over again and it must be the form / imbalances / gait / whatever the fck that is doing this to me. I know some people stay injury free with bad biomechanics, but they might have stronger joints, ligaments etc. I never did sports in my life, started running 3 years ago when I was like 28. I'm not running insane number of MPW, I do everything 'by the book', and injuries are still there. So I need to fix my deficiencies before getting back there again.

Meaning what? I'm not ignoring anything. Do you mean my form is so bad or not the reason of injuries?

Meaning that you wouldn't know what good form is even if hit you in the face.

Sean Schniederjan's short ebooks with simple exercises. Quadratus Lumborum Fixed was very helpful for me. Others with hips in title, Conquor Your Uneven Hips, Weaponized Hips, Cure Tight Hips Anywhere.

Then how about you explain something to me instead of being snarky? You clearly know more than I do,.

What I see is a lot of hip flexion. I'm in a similar situation, did gait retraining for over a year with 2 different PT's, constant ankle injuries and foot pain that never resolves despite a million soleus eccentrics and side lying leg lifts and all the PT in the world.

My advice is mobilize your hip flexors. You need more hip extension. You can see that your pelvis is moved backwards in relation to your landing point and your chest. In other words, your pelvis has moved backwards in relation to your center of gravity because you cannot extend your hips adequately. This means as you run faster you must get mobility from the rotation (hip drop) in your pelvis instead of the hip flexors, and speed from the calves instead of the glutes, and things get quite irritated and overloaded.

You need way more hip extension. The good news is it's very easy to fix. Specifically on the couch stretch, I would practically guarantee that you will find this quite difficult and an area for improvement

Here is what I see (link)

The hips stay behind the center of gravity by quite a bit throughout the entire stride, and you never reach true hip extension

You need to stop running in slow motion first of all! That's kind of a joke but in a way I'm serious. Real running isn't in slow motion, your legs move a lot faster. At least they should. Some people have this sort of slow motion idea of running they get from watching slow motion video clips. You need to stop that and start thinking more of the rhythm of it. Running with higher cadence sorts out some form issues because, running 180 spm for example, whatever you do it has to be 3 times/second. Your body just doesn't have time to do anything too crazy if it has to do it 3+ times every second.

Because of your fixation on form (minimizes what's going on with your body and promises an easy fix) you're ignoring the obvious questions. What you call poor form is the body compensating for something that appears during strenuous exercise. Only fixing the poor form is compensating for a compensation. What's causing the intractable poor form? Why, when, and where is the form causing problems?