How much faster could one person get by correcting their form?

Predictor wrote:

Do we have some examples? Nico Young? Conner Mantz? Karissa Schweizer? Mary Cain? Probably good to leave their form alone. Salazar tried to fix Cain's. Schweizer says she has made some improvements but photos from JH look exactly the same. Unless someone can provide a few examples of elite runners who improved form, I am not buying it.

Could you pinpoint elite runners gains due to anything specific at all ? That doesn't mean specific things don't contribute to improvements (I think form even less so when it comes to elites, they are already at the diminishing returns point).

Bad Wigins wrote:

WAY faster. But you have to do it right, and that means listen to a sprint coach. If there are any reading this, they're laughing heartily at the previous poster.

If you're bouncing too high, you are setting a natural limit to your speed by restricting your cadence from ever getting high enough to run a good 800m or less.

Several things wrong here. First is that you have no idea if the runner is competing 800 meters and down. Second is that you should damn well know that form has nothing to do with success in the 800 as you have all sorts of experience watching great runners that have completely different form and all have success. Amos and Rudisha run completely different and there's nothing wrong with that. Let's not even talk about Juantorena...talking about form in this manner is akin to telling someone that they need to completely change their body type. Perhaps there is an absolute best body and form for a human being to be the best a human can possibly achieve at certain disciplines. The fact that someone that runs like Amos ran the fastest 800m last year suggests that human beings have not reached the point where it matters.

Still, it’s instructive to watch how an elite runners form breaks down at the end of a close, hard run race.

At that point they start to look like every other pavement plodder.

In the 80s, Brooks Johnson claimed that he could turn a 28:48 10k guy into a 27:30 simply by fixing his form. He claimed that if you pushed off from your foot pointed straight ahead, rather than to the side as most of us do, cumulatively this would put you 4-500m further down the track over 10k.

You have 180 strides/minute, so for 29 minutes that's ~5200 strides. To gain 500m you'd have to gain 10cm/stride, when at most you'd gain 1cm, for 50-55m.

Brooks was a little silly about things like this.

Are there any other sports where people argue form isn’t important?

Just because there is no one perfect form doesn’t mean there isn’t bad form.

Look at golf for example, lots of good ways to swing a club, not all the pros do it the same, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t bad ways to swing the club.

Ideal form will vary person to person, but bad form will always be bad form.

Predictor wrote:

Do we have some examples? Nico Young? Conner Mantz? Karissa Schweizer? Mary Cain? Probably good to leave their form alone. Salazar tried to fix Cain's. Schweizer says she has made some improvements but photos from JH look exactly the same. Unless someone can provide a few examples of elite runners who improved form, I am not buying it.

I’m a sprint coach who offered to fix the form of a high school 800 runner who ran 2:17 as a freshman and 2:15 as a sophomore. After a dozen or so lessons over the summer, she ran 2:08.5 last season as a junior.

SomeoneWhoKnows wrote:

Hypothetically... wrote:

Hypothetically, say there are two people who are exactly the same in every way. Now imagine that one of them has bad form, and one of them have the absolute best form possible. They are both in excellent shape. What would the difference in time probably be?

Running form has nothing to do with running fast. We are built the way we are built, and running how we run is a natural motion. Trying to change your form will lead to injury and will not make you faster. Anyone who disagrees with that is wrong.

See any elite runner with horrible form and any super slow runner with great form.

Note: Great form is a myth. It's just a visual that looks good but has nothing to do with fast running.

Running form does matter. But aesthetically pleasing does not necessarily mean good or fast. Almost all elites have very efficient form. None of them have terrible form that is absolutely detrimental as you often see in the middle of the pack at a road race.

Form can be improved on but I agree with elites and even talented D1 runners it is a risky thing to do. Focusing on form breakdown when someone gets tired isn't a bad idea. But form is tied into body type and there isn't a one form fits all model. I think most people who train at high level develop a form that works for them naturally.

i went from forefoot strike to midfoot over the last year and got way faster...for not having achilles injuries anymore

ElGuerroujFan wrote:

I was the one who was asking. I wanted to know because someone I knew said that I bounced too much when I ran, and I was wondering how much effort I should put in to tweak my form... also I was wondering if it would help much to breaking 5 in the mile. Thank you guys for the responses

Maybe wear a sports bra?

Free_the_thigh wrote:

Are there any other sports where people argue form isn’t important?

Just because there is no one perfect form doesn’t mean there isn’t bad form.

Look at golf for example, lots of good ways to swing a club, not all the pros do it the same, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t bad ways to swing the club.

Ideal form will vary person to person, but bad form will always be bad form.

Most golf swings that look horrible are really good over the parts that matters. Just like bad running form. People get distracted by some weird arm motion or head bobs but the important parts of the legs applying force to the ground tend to be pretty good.

The question with running is can you actually improve someones form in the ways that make them faster? There isn't much evidence for that.

somebody’s got to stop the apocalypse wrote:

Predictor wrote:

Do we have some examples? Nico Young? Conner Mantz? Karissa Schweizer? Mary Cain? Probably good to leave their form alone. Salazar tried to fix Cain's. Schweizer says she has made some improvements but photos from JH look exactly the same. Unless someone can provide a few examples of elite runners who improved form, I am not buying it.

I’m a sprint coach who offered to fix the form of a high school 800 runner who ran 2:17 as a freshman and 2:15 as a sophomore. After a dozen or so lessons over the summer, she ran 2:08.5 last season as a junior.

care to share what she was doing so wrong? Obviously with one person, it is hard to say if the improvement was due to form work, maturity, or other training.

Form is like beauty. If we throw names out, there will be great debate about whether their form is good or bad. Change a high schoolers form and they improve over a year. Maybe they would have improved even more had the form been left alone.

SDSU Aztec wrote:

Running form is mostly based on genetics and there isn't much that can be done to correct it. Tweeking arm carriage isn't going to have much of an effect.

Dr James Li greatly improved Lagat's running form at WSU. There was a thread on here about it. I will produce it if I have to.

Showed vid of a lumbering Lagat 1996 & 1997.

somebody’s got to stop the apocalypse wrote:

Predictor wrote:

Do we have some examples? Nico Young? Conner Mantz? Karissa Schweizer? Mary Cain? Probably good to leave their form alone. Salazar tried to fix Cain's. Schweizer says she has made some improvements but photos from JH look exactly the same. Unless someone can provide a few examples of elite runners who improved form, I am not buying it.

I’m a sprint coach who offered to fix the form of a high school 800 runner who ran 2:17 as a freshman and 2:15 as a sophomore. After a dozen or so lessons over the summer, she ran 2:08.5 last season as a junior.

That's just normal fitness progression.

Ya, no. Most golf swings that look horrible are horrible. Go to any public driving range, you will see tons of horrible looking golf swings and none of them will be any good.

Anyways how running form or golf form looks is a different question from whether or not the form is good (and a sillier question too).

If you flip your question around you will get your answer. Can you change someone’s form in a way to make them slower, obviously yes. Therefore, some forms are faster than other forms. If some forms are faster than others, then you can alter someone’s form and make them quicker.

You can’t alter everyone’s form, some people naturally have good form. Similarly some people also have terrible form. Don’t belive me, just go sit on a bench along a busy boardwalk in the summer. You will see far more people running with poor form than good form.

To carry on, the thing about running form is that it is not incredibly complex. So most people naturally have fairly good form.

The question of how much one can improve by improving their form depends on how bad their form is in the first place.

This assumes there is a single "right" form.

In data from Eastern Michigan, it was not possible to tell someone's running economy (as one measure) by looking at "form". Then the head coach tried to predict which ones based on "form", he was not able to do so.

Endurance training, as in high mileage, will create excellent from is possible.

Free_the_thigh wrote:

Ya, no. Most golf swings that look horrible are horrible. Go to any public driving range, you will see tons of horrible looking golf swings and none of them will be any good.

.

And of those people at the local driving range how many of them are pros that we are talking about? Zero.