Good read:
“Most people will settle into the arm swing that is the most efficient for them.”
Good read:
“Most people will settle into the arm swing that is the most efficient for them.”
LetsRun.com wrote:
“Most people will settle into the arm swing that is the most efficient for them.”
That's what I've always said. The form nuts are nuts. Running is a purely natural motion. Do lots of it and your body will find the form best fit for your body. Fiddling with it to make it look prettier (which is all the form nuts can really do) is nuts.
maybe i'm missing something, but it seems like all they did was confirm that regardless of what your 'normal' form is, that is better than doing absurd things like keeping your hands behind you back?
nothing in this convinces me that, particularly given time to adjust, intentional changes to arm carriage wouldn't lead to efficiency
Gonna Have to Agree wrote:
LetsRun.com wrote:“Most people will settle into the arm swing that is the most efficient for them.”
That's what I've always said. The form nuts are nuts. Running is a purely natural motion. Do lots of it and your body will find the form best fit for your body. Fiddling with it to make it look prettier (which is all the form nuts can really do) is nuts.
Very sensible indeed.
Jeptoo is a great example of someone that should never change her arm swing...she wouldn't survive otherwise with the way her knees collapse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSPi3mx84J0
That being said, if I see a runner that doesn't have a symmetric arm swing...I'm looking to what is wrong (not symmetric) below the waist.
It depends. I've seen plenty of kids and girls swing their arms in front of them so that there is more side to side movement than forward-backward movement. This is not efficient. Same idea goes for stride. A lot of kids overstride. When I changed both my footstrike and my stridelength, I became a faster sprinter and came to feel much more comfortable when running fast.
There's no point in focusing a lot on form for most runners, but some runners have awful form that could definitely be improved. It's ignorant to think form should never be adjusted.
Guppy wrote:
It depends. I've seen plenty of kids and girls swing their arms in front of them so that there is more side to side movement than forward-backward movement. This is not efficient. Same idea goes for stride. A lot of kids overstride. When I changed both my footstrike and my stridelength, I became a faster sprinter and came to feel much more comfortable when running fast.
There's no point in focusing a lot on form for most runners, but some runners have awful form that could definitely be improved. It's ignorant to think form should never be adjusted.
^This.
I made changes in footstrike and arm swing and improved a lot.
Some people do have weird biomechanics, but it is unlikely that you will find runners that have actions as weird as:
Holding their arms behind their back,
Draping their arms across their chest,
Holding their arms behind their head.
Therefore, it is unsurprising that they will be more efficient in their normal style as it is closer to the 'ideal' than the three styles mentioned.
However, this does not mean it is perfect, just because one style of running is better than another, or three in this case, it does not mean it is the most efficient in terms of energy expenditure.
Here is what Renato Canova had to say over the issue of kenyans having a higher arm swing:
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=5834628&page=0
"Running with higher arm swing doesn't allow a correct action of the respiratory muscles, and this is Always a mistake, since who runs in this way can't have a correct motion of the arms, and is obliged to rotate the trunk."
&
"But it's out of discussion that an angle, at the elbow, between 80 and 100 grades is the best for Optimizing the performance.”
LetsRun.com wrote:
Good read:
“Most people will settle into the arm swing that is the most efficient for them.”
It's bad science. They want to compare a movement that has become subconscious with one that is conscious. Of course the subconscious movement will be more efficient in the short term.
Anyhow, the arms are mostly mass dampers for the legs. If you change the arms and not the legs it's pretty stupid.
I'm sure some really crappy swimmers would be less efficient if their stroke was changed, but that doesn't mean eventually they wouldn't be a lot faster with their new stroke mechanics.
People need to remember there are more sh.t scientists out there then good ones, just like there are more sh.t runners then there are world class runners.
cd16 wrote:
maybe i'm missing something, but it seems like all they did was confirm that regardless of what your 'normal' form is, that is better than doing absurd things like keeping your hands behind you back?
nothing in this convinces me that, particularly given time to adjust, intentional changes to arm carriage wouldn't lead to efficiency
Yep. Analogous "study": I have proven that my chili recipie produces the absolute optimal chili. To prove this, I made three batches of chilli. The first contained my usual blend of spices. The second contained a pile of dog poop instead of my usual spices. In the third batch, I replaced my usual spices with a cup and a half of brake fluid. In a blind taste test (literally so after sample #3), my usual chili recipie was universally preferred, thus proving that my blend of spices is the best possible blend of spices that one could possibly put into chili.
The article's conclusion is based on the (rather poor) logic that "we can find a method less efficient than X" is the same as "X is the most efficient method possible." Of corse your usual arm carriage is better then running around with your hands behind your back like some kind of mental case. That doesn't mean that your usual arm carriage is optimal.
poor logic wrote:
cd16 wrote:maybe i'm missing something, but it seems like all they did was confirm that regardless of what your 'normal' form is, that is better than doing absurd things like keeping your hands behind you back?
nothing in this convinces me that, particularly given time to adjust, intentional changes to arm carriage wouldn't lead to efficiency
Yep. Analogous "study": I have proven that my chili recipie produces the absolute optimal chili. To prove this, I made three batches of chilli. The first contained my usual blend of spices. The second contained a pile of dog poop instead of my usual spices. In the third batch, I replaced my usual spices with a cup and a half of brake fluid. In a blind taste test (literally so after sample #3), my usual chili recipie was universally preferred, thus proving that my blend of spices is the best possible blend of spices that one could possibly put into chili.
The article's conclusion is based on the (rather poor) logic that "we can find a method less efficient than X" is the same as "X is the most efficient method possible." Of corse your usual arm carriage is better then running around with your hands behind your back like some kind of mental case. That doesn't mean that your usual arm carriage is optimal.
That's one of the best posts I've seen anywhere this year.
And a dead-on dissection of a really stupid article and stupid study.
Bravo.
This is not what the SCIENTIFIC article is reporting. Arellano and Kram (2014) compared running with a subject-specific normal arm swing and running with the arms constricted. The authors hypothesized that running with the arms constricted would increase metabolic cost, thus indicating that arm swing may be beneficial. Arellano and Kram (2014) found evidence that supported this hypothesis as well as that arm swing decreased torso rotation. If you actually read the article that Arellano and Kram wrote, you would understand that they were not making a statement about whether or not biomechanists should change the way people swing their arms during running.
sp2 wrote:
poor logic wrote:Yep. Analogous "study": I have proven that my chili recipie produces the absolute optimal chili. To prove this, I made three batches of chilli. The first contained my usual blend of spices. The second contained a pile of dog poop instead of my usual spices. In the third batch, I replaced my usual spices with a cup and a half of brake fluid. In a blind taste test (literally so after sample #3), my usual chili recipie was universally preferred, thus proving that my blend of spices is the best possible blend of spices that one could possibly put into chili.
The article's conclusion is based on the (rather poor) logic that "we can find a method less efficient than X" is the same as "X is the most efficient method possible." Of corse your usual arm carriage is better then running around with your hands behind your back like some kind of mental case. That doesn't mean that your usual arm carriage is optimal.
That's one of the best posts I've seen anywhere this year.
And a dead-on dissection of a really stupid article and stupid study.
Bravo.
Boy oh boy, am I ever glad I met you guys!
I changed my form, and fell in a ditch.
Agreed.
cd16 wrote:
maybe i'm missing something, but it seems like all they did was confirm that regardless of what your 'normal' form is, that is better than doing absurd things like keeping your hands behind you back?
nothing in this convinces me that, particularly given time to adjust, intentional changes to arm carriage wouldn't lead to efficiency
You dare question the science czars?
All hail science! Sci-unce!!! SCOI-OOONTZ!!!
While that may be fine to be efficient in your arm swing for a marathon...
...if you're running an 800m or 1500m you need some power resulting from proper arm swing. That need outweighs "efficiency". I don't think Coach Clark is yelling at his runners that they need to be natural in their arm movements to be "efficient".
THIS STUDY DID NOT LOOK AT REASONABLE CHANGES IN ARM POSITIONS, GOOD LORD.
Salazar - Cain
Hi
I'm the senior author of the original scientific article that was summarized in the NYT blog article.
I think some of you are missing our point.
We fully recognize that the arm positions are absurd/extreme.
That was our goal. We found that if you do something extreme with your arms, e.g. clasp your hands behind your back, it only causes a 3% worsening of running economy.
If you accept that finding, then how much could possibly be gained by small changes ("improvements") to a runner's natural arm swing motion? Probably not much. That's all we are saying with regard to running form.
Prior to our study, several others have found no significant increase in oxygen consumption when the hands are clasped behind the low back (same position as in our study). That's why we also studied the more extreme positions. We also studied a larger sample and we think we did a better technical job than previous studies.
While some have criticized our study as being a "duh!", hindsight is 20/20. By clasping the hands behind the back, we reduced the activity in many arms muscles. That of course reduces their energy consumption. However, we've shown that doing so requires the use of more expensive trunk muscles.
Finally, this study is a capstone to a decade+ of other studies in which we have dissected the overall metabolic cost of running into the various tasks of running. Here is a link to our recent overview paper.
http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/16/icb.icu033.abstract
Rodger Kram