using hips while running

I have noticed that faster distance seem to "roll" smoothly through their stride from the hips. Doing hip flexor stretches will help give you a smoother stride. Also, the butt stretch where you sit with one leg straight out (on the floor) and the other bent at the knee with your foot over the straight leg and turn your body to stretch.

The running motion has to be natural. Of course, strengthening your abs and other basic stretches will also help.

bump.

help? wrote:

bump.

Yeah that's it. It's called bumping uglies. I try to do this pre-run warm-up where I rock my hips forward and backwards over and over again. I call them pelvic thrusts. Man do they feel good, and seem to really relax me before my run.

I reckon I'll take some mustard with my biscuits.

There has to be a decent amount of movement in the hips for proper running form. I'm not sure what you mean by rocking the hips forward. At toe off, the hips should be rotated back on that side, inducing a stretch of the core abdominal muscles. Then, when pulling the leg forward on the swing phase of the stride, the abdominal muscles should contract, using the energy stored by the initial stretch to rotate the hips forward. Without this rotation all the force to drive the leg forward needs ot come from the hip flexors, which decreases efficiency and increases the chance for overuse injuries.

Of course, in order to run with this sort of efficient motion it requires a certain amount of flexibility in the lower back and pelvis and good strength of the abdominals.

Is this the kind of motion you're referring to, or are you talking about a tilt of the pelvis, either forward or side to side?

yeah, i was trying to talk about what you said. i didn't really know exactly what it was or how to phrase it. how do you become better at this?

I actually developed a lot of injury problems related to this, so I understand the concern. First, I'm not sure how you know you have a problem with pelvic mobility. It might be easier to watch yourself walk in a mirror than run, or to have someone else watch. Do your hips rotate at all? Try to walk with an exaggeration of this movement, really throwing each hip forward as you walk. If in doing this you feel you lack a free rotation of the pelvis you could have some sort of mobility issues around your lower back and pelvis. There should be some good PT exercises you can pick up to help with this. I actually went the route of getting some therapeutic massage to unlock some of the small joints in the lumbar and sacral segments of the spine. I'm sure that there are approaches involving yoga or rolfing or whatever, but I've never tried them.

The other part of the equation is having enough abdominal strength to drive that hip action throughout a run. For this you have to build up your core abdominal strength. It seems like every workout program now is about core strenght, so whether you use an excise ball or whatever, you need to concentrate on these workouts. Especially exercises that emphasize a twisting movement which will mimic the pelvic rotation you want to develop.

The last step will be to concentrate on actually using correct form when running. Pay attention to your running stride and actually concentrate on generating forward drive of your legs with your hips, rather than focusing on driving your knees forward. Pay attention to your upper body. Are your shoulders rotating? Usually if your hips are not moving your whole upperbody will not be rotating either and you'll be rock solid all the way down to your legs. You do not want this. In addition to focusing on using your abdominals and driving forward with the hips while running, do some drills specifically designed to emphasize this movement. bounding exercises where you emphasize generating power from your hips, etc.

Good luck.

JY