Form improvement. Is it worth it?

Its always worth working on form with drills and focus during reps, but for most formwork is going to be an incremental gains thing compared to improving strength and endurance. A lot of improvement in form will come with increased endurance.

I was able to make some beneficial changes by simply adjusting my arm movement based on Paul Mackinnon's advice. It felt fairly natural after about two weeks.

I've never really believed wholesale changes to form were necessary, aside from someone that truly is risking getting hurt from the way they run. But what I do believe is helpful is in the last third of a race, when you're really hurting, focusing on at least maintaining form. For example, I tend to let my arms swing across my body when I get tired, as well as lower my cadence. And I try to make a conscience effort to avoid that by reminding myself to focus as things get difficult in a race.

Now, does that necessarily make me run faster in the moment? Probably not, but what it does do is forces me to focus on something productive when it might be easy to let the fatigue take over. So the end result is ideally finishing the race with as much as my body will allow. Which you could certainly argue does help me run faster. Granted that's a bit of a distinction between better form itself yielding faster results. But who cares where the credit goes.

It might help.

Especially if it is done by training coordination, plymoetrics and strength.

But I think that you will find that if you increase tempo the diagrams and parameters you refer to will show improvement without doing any training to improve form at all. If it doesn't improve significantly you might have a problem with form.

I run 10k barefoot on tarmac every week as part of my 145km weeks for the last 10 years including barefoot strides and i often get compliments on my form in races and parkruns. someone said I run like the Africans and he's never seen it before.

it's the best way to learn how to run gently and efficiently using the 200,000 nerve endings in the sole to provide the brain with instant unobstructed feedback. proprioception. your soles can teach you everything instinctively (running will become fun and you will feel like you're floating along the road) but a coach can only give you THEIR opinion on what is correct for you. running with shoes is like trying to play darts with a blindfold on, the shoes block the proprioception.

I can't heelstrike if I try and I have tried, never a photo of me overstriding in a race.

Imagine if a tennis coach told a student "Just swing the racquet however feels natural. After thousands of swings, your body will find the best way." Or a swim coach said "Just get through the water, eventually you will figure out the best way." This would be coaching malpractice and grounds for firing.

Running is no different. Watch pro runners. There is some variation in form, but proper posture, footstrike & push off, arm movement etc. are largely similar. One of the biggest visible differences between slow and fast people is form. Improving form is integral to being a faster runner, just as it is to being a better swimmer.

It's a tough one, because running form is a complicated equation, in which your body is finding the most efficient way to move at a given time.

I think you can improve form by doing drills, improving mobility and gaining strength throughout your body - but in my experience, people are very bad at identifying what constitutes efficient form. They can tell you what looks aesthetically pleasing (though even this is a matter of taste) but telling someone to imitate these pleasing qualities isn't necessarily good for performance.

On the flip side, I doubt anyone would encourage someone to run with form like Helen Obiri, and yet she's obviously incredibly efficient (you can't be one of the top 5 marathoners in the world without being so).

Form matters, but only very little. e.g. arm swing paper

We compared the metabolic cost of running using normal arm swing with the metabolic cost of running while restricting the arms in three different ways: (1) holding the hands with the arms behind the back in a relaxed position (BACK), (2) holding the arms across the chest (CHEST) and (3) holding the hands on top of the head (HEAD). We hypothesized that running without arm swing would demand a greater metabolic cost than running with arm swing. Indeed, when compared with running using normal arm swing, we found that net metabolic power demand was 3, 9 and 13% greater for the BACK, CHEST and HEAD conditions, respectively (all P<0.05).