What the heck is good form?

You can definitely improve your mechanics with regular attention to the issue, but be wary of believing you can force your form to adopt an ideal standard.

There was an old cartoon by Terry Gilliam (former Monty Python animator) that was presented on the International Festival of Animation, hosted by actress Jean Marsh (co-creator of "Upstairs, Downstairs"). The premise concerned the history of aviation and one of the early efforts came from a king who tried to teach his subjects to fly. His revolutionary method consisted of having a guy stand at the edge of a cliff, at which point the king, seated comfortably in a chair behind the subject, would shove the sole of his foot into the guy's butt and yell "FLY!" as the man sailed over the edge. Splat! It didn't work. So he had another guinea pig step forward and he booted that guy off, ordering him to "FLY!" as the guy fell screaming to his death. This went on for awhile ... (Boot) "FLY!" (Boot) "FLY!" ... until the king got frustrated with the gross ineptitude and treasonable disobedience of his subjects and decided the obvious solution was to yell "FLY!!!!!" in an even louder, more exasperating and more demanding voice. Same result. Eventually he ran out of subjects and the experiment in human flight was temporarily abandoned.

It all illustrates the fact that humans are not structurally capable of performing some tasks. Commanding them to fly in the most urgent, "obey your king, you stupid fool, and flap your arms harder!" voice won't solve the unsolvable problem. Now a vulture can fly for sure, but trying to force it to fly like a hummingbird won't work either. Its skeletal structure and its muscle fiber type are not designed for rapid wing movements. A woodpecker and an egret have different flight mechanics as well. You see where this is headed.

Form would be simple to assess and correct if we could all eventually adopt the same "perfect" stride mechanics. But we might not be able to force our form to mimic (and eventually become) that of Paul Tergat or Seb Coe. One guy might be bowlegged, another might have a leg length discrepancy, another might have some scoliosis, another might have a tiny twist in a few of the vertebrae in the thoracic spine which cause a tightness or "hanging up" of the column all the way down to the hip, making the neck of the femur sit in a rotated manner within the cavity of the acetabulum. For the bowlegged guy to consciously work on making his knees stay closer together might be futile and injurious. For the coach of the guy with the slightly off-center hip joint to bark, "You! Can't you get that left knee pointed forward, not outward? Then do it, dammit!" (or even to gently suggest, "Try keeping that leg pointed in the right direction when you think about it, will ya?") might be analogous to the stubborn king ordering his subjects to do something they shouldn't be trying.

The point? Consciously working on your running form can improve your stride mechanics within the framework of your structural limitations, but not beyond. If you aren't symmetrical, your efforts will only take you so far. An obvious structural problem might need to be addressed by someone trained in biostructural correction. Or a simple change in footwear could do the trick. But if you aren't fundamentally built for it, forcing your form to the mold of the latest archetype might not work for you anymore than it would for the heron trying to fly like a sparrow.

So what can every one of us do regardless of our limitations? Basically, we want to feel upright, weightless and gliding yet "popping" with a minimal ground contact time. Focusing on some drills and maintaining a little short speed (with attention to mechanics) year-round can do an adequate job without having to eat into your running time too much. For example, having a stride frequency which is too low (160 steps per minute would qualify unless you're something like 6'6" or taller) can be almost always be improved at least a little with the right drills and short speed without having to radically alter skeletal structure or fiber type. Having a short, choppy stride can also be corrected to some degree, as can a stride that is too long and loping. "To some degree" is the qualifier. Remember the buzzard that can't flap its wings like a hummingbird ... overall size, skeletal configuration and muscle fiber type and distribution all limit us from exactly copying the next guy, albeit with a much more subtle distinction than with the big soaring bird and the little hovering bird. Changing fiber type to that degree isn't possible through training alone (it's more feasible through chronic stimulation), but most fibers can acquire some of the characteristics of other fibers, or at least work synergistically with each other, through balanced training.

It's mostly variants of explosive drills and short speed supplementation that will create the light, quick, gliding/popping strides. Another thing to do is to make sure you keep a decently-quick stride frequency at all paces, even on easy runs. People with certain physical characteristics often think mileage "ruins their speed" and it's usually because they adopt lazier mechanics the slower their pace and because they don't stay in touch with the short strides and basic drills that train the nervous system, maintain an efficient stretch-shortening cycle and keep the routine livened up.

The Bramble and the Rose...you're not a Coach, are you?

Not a Coach that anyone would want to listen to or be able to follow if you gave your essay in lecture or "pep" talk form.

Kids have short attention spans and don't have time or interest in your theories. Keep it short and sweet.

Good luck training the nervous system!

Yeah, Bramble had nothing interesting to say.

On the other hand, older school's post was sure chock full of info, wasn't it?

older school gibbered something with no merit (undoubtedly his norm)

"You're a rattletrap tonight.

My eeeeears are gettin' tired!"

- Rhett Miller

The Bramble and the Rose wrote:

"You're a rattletrap tonight.

My eeeeears are gettin' tired!"

LOL! That's from Wont Be Home, right? Fuggin awesome song!

good form = ryan hall

Yes, it's "Won't Be Home." What the heck, let's hijack the thread and turn it into something worthwhile. It's already been soiled with poo flinging. If you're an Old 97s fan, get a load of this live version of "Won't Be Home." It's a good example of why this band is known as "hard-charging."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcxSCHEu0G4

The song starts at 1:28 into the video. Plug your headphones in so you can hear the bass, turn up the volume to where you like it and you'll be smiling, dancing and head banging along with Ken and playing the air guitar and the air drums before you know it. It's such an energetic, feel-good song that jumps right out of the screen at you. Of course, this was recorded professionally for a DVD, so its sound quality is an order of magnitude above your typical youtube video, but even this can't capture the vibrant electricity present when you see the Old 97s in person.

Funny enough, Rhett Miller went to the high school where I was teaching/coaching in the late 1980s and we knew each other by sight (not well or anything). I also saw him perform solo back then (he was a popular musician in clubs around town even as a 15-year-old). But I finally saw the Old 97s and they're the best live band I've ever seen. Other groups might be better in different live settings - a wide-open outdoor venue, perhaps - but in the bar setting with a few cold ones in you, it's hard to imagine anybody beating the Old 97s. Almost everyone who sees them live (and that includes lifelong twang-phobes like me) agrees they're the standard by which others will be measured for a long time.

This recording is IMO much better than their album version of the same song. A rarity I think, but all of their live music tops their mainstream-catered studio recordings hands down. Another example of a live recording that's way better than the album version is Robyn Hitchcock's live performance of "Madonna of the Wasps" on Letterman in 1989.

Yessir, that's a good rendition that captures something you can't get on the albums. I've never seen 'em live but hear great things from everybody who has.

Here's video of the Hitchcock performnace on Letterman. God bless you, YouTube. It's a little choppy, but he's hella good and his sound mix is super.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_THW0JyH0I

Good, good. Sometimes I wonder if a youtube audio mix is a product of the original mixing console or if it was touched up somehow with audio editing software. But the "Madonna of the Wasps" audio mix is just like I remember it. Plus the tape is choppy, so it wasn't doctored - at least not very well.

Here's the old acclaimed MTV video for the same song. The volume may need to be doubled on this one to compare the two versions, but I prefer the live performance.

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&VideoID=1205230

Note the closeup of the Madonna's "stinger" at 3:05! The story behind the song is that the protagonist was trapped in an old castle and was visited nightly at the window by the strange Madonna creature, then one night she crawled into his room, they made love, and she suddenly injected him with a venom that would nearly kill him and damage his health. Later he escaped the castle and came upon the Madonna curled up in the frost like a wasp in its death throes. She looked up and into his eyes, recognizing him and pleading with her own eyes for forgiveness.

Strange story and a very abstract video. I can't figure out the significance of the falling carrots, but maybe there's an explanation of it somewhere on the internet. Great song, though.

Maybe we can talk about running again if the little kids here can lengthen their attention spans. I can understand how reading several paragraphs is a difficult and trying experience for a certain poster who has the brain of a four-year-old boy (I'm sure that boy was glad to get rid of it, too), but the rest of the audience here should be a little more advanced than that. That kind of impatience isn't a trait that's conducive to becoming a great runner, you know.

The Bramble and the Rose wrote:

A magnificent post.

Your post was awesome.

Probably my favourite post since Malmo's Kung Fu story.

Just to clarify, I was talking about The Bramble and the Rose's first post on this thread.

Poor, poor lives gone...

If my post took 45 seconds for you to read, you indeed should get back to school.

What's wrong? Did I insult you or your nom de plume?

Call me Mr. Obvious, but I was simply pointing out that Bramble likes to ramble and he wasn't going to teach anyone anything as he prattled on.

older school wrote:

Poor, poor lives gone...

If my post took 45 seconds for you to read, you indeed should get back to school.

What's wrong? Did I insult you or your nom de plume?

Call me Mr. Obvious, but I was simply pointing out that Bramble likes to ramble and he wasn't going to teach anyone anything as he prattled on.

You're obviously not out to make friends.

Bramble's post may not get through to unmotivated coach-dependant kids the likes of whom you may have had in mind, but to a genuinely interested student of the sport his post is actually interesting, believe it or not.

The bare truth is: Bramble has contributed to the discussion, and you have not. If you have an opinion contrary to Bramble's, how about rather than merely making useless quips, you provide a counter-argument. That way you'll actually be helping the discussion.

I've seen some of your other posts, and I still can't figure out if you're a troll who's playing a role or if you really are a cyncial old codger...

If you're a troll: 9/10. Awesome job.

If not: maybe you should get out of your cave a little more often.

Definitely...if you went out to craft a perfect runners body then they could have perfect mechanics but for the rest of us we just make due.

Alright, then, back to the subject of form.

Basically (and not surprisingly), your ideal form will be the form that gets you from the start to the finish of an all-out effort the fastest with the least squandering of energy. Since we're all unique in structure and fiber composition (if only by degrees), it's like I was saying - you can't know if that form will be exactly that of the fastest runner out there or even the "smoothest looking" runner out there. Instead, unless you can have extensive structural evaluation, muscle biopsies and gait analysis, you will have to discover much of it for yourself. Rather, you'll have to wait for your body to reveal it to you. So, in a sense, people are correct when they say lots of running will naturally get your body to slot into the form that's right for you. But you can deliberately nudge it along the way to adopt some of the mechanics that are known to be universal characteristics of correct form, and to prevent your stride from becoming lifeless during periods of otherwise long, easy running. What becomes too comfortable and thoughtless at 7:30 per mile might not be as functional and economical at sub-5:00 per mile.

Why explain the reasoning behind these supplementary procedures like drills and strides, which should really take up less than 8% of your workout time each week and are therefore just an afterthought compared to the far more important act of running, running and more running? After all, when you go to the dentist, you simply want your teeth to be straight, white and free of decay, right? You usually aren't interested in hearing the dentist explain how to interpret an X-ray, why gutta percha is such a good filling material for a root canal, which antibiotic is most effective against Streptococcus mutans or how to use all those implements and materials you see lying around on those trays and in drawers (and you sure don't want him to strap you into the chair, put a bite block in your mouth, turn on a drill and ask you, "Is it safe?"). But the dentist needs to know dozens of times more than meets than the eye to make even the simplest procedures go without complications and discomfort to you, the patient. Your dental history plays a role in every one of those simple procedures as well - which X-ray angles might be necessary, what dose of sedative to use, what surface and which angle to begin drilling and which type of filling material to use when filling a cavity, whether or not to make you pay the bill in full on the spot since you stiffed him the last five times he put you on a payment plan ...

While you can be just fine without learning anything about dentistry other than to follow the dentist's instructions, your running is something you have to take an active role in every day, often responding to how you feel at the time to get the specific effect you need. You can't always rely on an exact protocol for even the day at hand, and you certainly can't reasonably rely on a series of unmodifiable workouts planned out weeks in advance, even if they're brilliant on paper. You will be better off learning why you're doing something so you can have a focal point for each procedure, each day, each week, etc. - to know exactly where you're headed - and so you can learn how to recognize when you've arrived. Knowing what you're looking for actually gives you more of a purpose and makes it easier to act with a central idea in mind as you visualize the process of stimulation/adaptation occurring.

So in regards to form, rather than having the emulation of some fast, "pretty" runner be the true goal, the aim should be to develop the stride characteristics (explosive footstrikes, ideal frequency, minimal "dead time," etc.) which allow your unique physiology to get from start to finish fastest.

Drills (the running kind, not the dentist kind) can serve numerous purposes. Among them is a dynamic range-of-motion warmup which circumvents pre-workout static stretching that may "take some of the tension out of the spring," so to speak. But when examining types of drills (let's include strides here), we might as well assign them a limited number of purposes, so it will be easier to find what we're looking for:

* We seek to minimize the inhibitory effects of the "Golgi tendon organ," which prevents excessive muscular force which could damage the involved joint or connective tissues. The GTO's autogenic inhibition reflex is activated during normal muscular activity, not only when high levels of force are involved, as was once thought. During movement, this reflex helps allocate workload evenly across an entire muscle; that is, if some of the fibers are taking up more of the load than others, their GTOs will be more active, which will tend to inhibit the contraction of those fibers and cause other muscle fibers to be involved with the workload, resulting in more efficient energy distribution.

Slower movements which involve both eccentric and concentric actions and which feature added resistance are good for reducing the GTO inhibition. These include traveling lunges and one-legged squats (with appropriate opposite arm action and breathing dynamics) in which the lowering and raising movements eventually (later in the season) become rapid but you "catch" yourself and hold the "down" position for a second or two. Single-leg or alternate-leg exercises are preferable for all drills once they can be performed correctly and comfortably. Things like wall sits, dead lifts and "bethaks" (deep body-weight squats where the heels come up off the floor and the knees go lower than the toes on the down position) also work on this aspect, but they're less sport-specific.

The improvements that take place during sport-specific resistance training are at least as much neurological as they are in the realm of muscle hypertrophy. This is especially true in repetitive activities like running, which require global, continuous (and often long-term) involvement of motor neurons responsible for fine motor control. Good luck not training the nervous system, since it regulates all movement, and you'll be training it every time you go for an "old school" run anyway. Why not have it functioning optimally for its desired purpose?

If you want to put additional resistance to a movement for the purpose of developing efficient allocation of workload, you can either do the movement slower or do it on an incline or both. In fact, when drills are first introduced to the routine, using slower movements for the "resistance-oriented" drills is preferable to using more rapid ones.

* We look to increase the potential of the "myotatic reflex," which is the mechanism by which a muscle reflexively contracts with a force commensurate with the degree of pre-stretching occurring in the spindles. Alternate-leg bounding or one-legged bounding are good for this. Again, the double-legged exercises like depth jumps (using boxes) are somewhat less effective for runners, since stabilization of movement is allocated to both legs at once, but they accomplish the same basic purpose.

* We want to increase neuromuscular coordination and proportional control (force regulation) by training motor units to act optimally in concert. All short strides which achieve a variety of speeds, including top speed, work here. Uphill sprints have received a lot of attention, and they represent the maximum level of motor neuron recruitment possible during the act of running. If the grade is above 14% (this may be variable depending on height/weight/leg length or unusual leg muscle traits), the stride mechanics (normally frequency) are usually altered too much to be running-specific. Downhill running at a grade of about 2% at top relaxed speed is also very helpful at times. But mostly, relaxed, short strides (through many speeds all the way up to full speed) on level surfaces will be your friends and allies when it comes to developing your optimal running form. After all, rapid and economical forward propulsion is your goal, right? - not bouncing up and down or holding a bent-knee position for a second or hopping uphill on one foot.

Some Canadian wrote:

If you have an opinion contrary to Bramble's, how about rather than merely making useless quips, you provide a counter-argument.

Opinions contrary to mine don't have counter-arguments.

That way you'll actually be helping the discussion.

Actually, I find him very educational as is. The instant I see one of his posts, I sit down on my sofa and read a science textbook.

I still can't figure out if you're a troll who's playing a role or if you really are a cyncial old codger ...

His logic, penmanship and argumentative skills might make him come off sounding like a gibbering simpleton, but don't let that fool you. He really is a gibbering simpleton.

Well goh-lee, it's like a politer, more explicit version of malmo!

...no offense to malmo.

Foot Fetish Family wrote:

b.s. you are probably some lazy ass coach who doesn't know sh1t about proper mechanics. you majored in phys. ed. and the "professors" gave you the answers before the test ... there are too many guys like you out there coaching now. that crap doesn't work anymore.

jesus christ you're a snob.

Some Canadian wrote:

Well goh-lee, it's like a politer, more explicit version of malmo!

...no offense to malmo.

I like this (less condescending) version much better!

Great posts, Bramble. Thank ya.