How to pull back leg faster

shorter pendulum swings faster. basically the closer your foot gets to your butt, the more your knee bends/leg "folds", the faster you can swing it forward.

Technique question wrote:

Does anybody know technique wise how to pull the back leg faster?

Try harder

Agree with this both in theory and in practice.

When moving at pace, I come very close to kicking myself in the butt, and often do kick myself in the butt on 200s/400s and sometimes the first hundred meters of 5k pace efforts.

Pull back with your arms. Too many people emphasize the pushing forward of the arms. The correct form is to pull back the arms.

In addition to that you want to run as tall as possible with quick steps. If you are sprinting you will be close or on the balls of your feet (depending on your speed and also body). If you are going slow you will be using a mid-foot stride. In general it is not a good idea to land heel first even when jogging as this is a breaking action.

But I noticed that all elites, both sprinters and long distance, get to toe off very early compared to their swinging leg and then you see that beautiful motion of both legs in the air one leg moving forward and the other pulled backwards. How they get to toe off so early on their gait?

waltertompatton wrote:

In general it is not a good idea to land heel first even when jogging as this is a breaking action.

Brace yourself for the insane shreiking of two dozen hobby joggin' heel strikers claiming foot strike doesn't matter.

doot doot wrote:

waltertompatton wrote:

In general it is not a good idea to land heel first even when jogging as this is a breaking action.

Brace yourself for the insane shreiking of two dozen hobby joggin' heel strikers claiming foot strike doesn't matter.

It doesn't. You are the one shrieking that it does matter.

The WR holder in the Marathon is not a hobbyjogger.

And of course, Kipchoge is a forefoot striker.

Kipchoge doesn't have the record.

So what is your point? Delusional? Kimetto, running even at the end of a fast marathon, at fast stride, is a fore-midfoot striker.

The leg should never be actively pulled like you're describing. It happens naturally when you run fast. The knee drives forward ahead of the lower leg, which passively folds up, reducing the length of the pendulum. It (mostly) isn't even a reflex motion. It's just physics. The same thing would happen if you didn't have hamstrings.

It may be that it doesn't happen for you when running at faster paces because you're not used to running at those speeds. You might be tensing muscles that should remain loose and fighting your own mechanics. You can work on it be practicing pure sprints. But as if you get aerobically faster so that you can run those speeds more regularly, you'll naturally figure out a more efficient stride.

doobitty doobitty doo wrote:

So what is your point? Delusional? Kimetto, running even at the end of a fast marathon, at fast stride, is a fore-midfoot striker.

Nope. The point is that many elites heel strike. There is no one way to land.

Kimmetto is a heelstriker for most of the race and it's really no big deal.

You don't have to be braking(why do most of you clowns not know how to spell that?) or slamming your heels just because you're hitting there first.

That is a dramatization to try to make it seem like a horrible thing.

doobitty doobitty doo wrote:

So what is your point? Delusional? Kimetto, running even at the end of a fast marathon, at fast stride, is a fore-midfoot striker.

Zoom in if you have to, moran

A couple of points:

Any time your foot hits the ground, regardless of where on your foot you land, there will be friction and thus braking. It is an inevitable part of running.

Yes, there may be different degrees of braking occurring depending on where your center of gravity is when that contact occurs, and yes, the more time that your foot spends on the ground, the more braking occurs, but we are talking about marginal differences if you otherwise land directly under your center of gravity.

There is probably a very good argument that changing the gait that comes naturally to you would have a detrimental effect that would offset any theoretical incremental gain obtained by the reduction in braking that may come with moving from a heel strike to a fore-or-mid-foot strike.

Most of us heel strikers are mid-or-fore-foot strikers once we get to pace. My Adidas Sequence trainers are about worn out on the outer side edge of my heel. My Adidas Bostons, which I do tempos in from time to time, have a pretty even wear pattern. My Adidas Adios Boosts are more worn on the toe than anywhere else.

Final point: too many people are focused on issues that have, at best, marginal incremental impact on running performance (foot strike, cadence, breathing rhythms, etc.). Weight training, diet and sleep are more impactful than foot strike, cadence and the like, and even those things are probably the last couple of percentage points of change in running performance as compared to the changes that will result from volume, quality workouts, periodization of training and the right number of rest days.

So for those of you focusing on cadence and foot strike, please make sure that you have already spent the requisite amount of time on those other things first.

Kimetto is an actual elite (not a deluded hobby jogger), that not only knows good running mechanics, but is not confused on the term heelstriker. The few slow-mo videos of kimetto reveal some slight asymmetry in his foot strike. The right foot can easily be deduced as a fore-midfoot strike. The left foot sweeps down with less dorsiflexed angle, and so, because his shoes lack zero-drop, his foot sweep gives the appearance of the heel coming down on the ground at near the same time as the midfoot. Nonetheless, the form of some elites (like moses moose) make it quite clear what is actually taking place.

An extremely deluded hobby jogger would try to use a still photo to make a case for foot strike.

I bet you're one of those slow-twitch guys.

wweee3hahahahahah!

wowzersssss wrote:

An extremely deluded hobby jogger would try to use a still photo to make a case for foot strike.

I bet you're one of those slow-twitch guys.

wweee3hahahahahah!

Pics mean it happened, moran.

Here is another photo of an elite, Patrick Makau, which evidently is interpreted by clueless hobby joggers (trying to interpret foot strike from still photos), that the guy in the picture is a heel striker.

https://imgur.com/a/KqjYa

Nothing could be further from the truth, when you watch video of Makau's running form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leTVLwEoHck

.

better to just shutup wrote:

Here is another photo of an elite, Patrick Makau, which evidently is interpreted by clueless hobby joggers (trying to interpret foot strike from still photos), that the guy in the picture is a heel striker.

https://imgur.com/a/KqjYa

Nothing could be further from the truth, when you watch video of Makau's running form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leTVLwEoHck

.

Nope. Some forefoot strike and some heel strike. No big deal.

However there is no magic that will make a picture of a foot with the actual heel ALREADY on the ground change that fact.