Running

How do I fix my form/footstrike?

The canonical bad running form looks something like this: slow cadence, long leaps, landing on a straight leg, ahead of your body, hands in front of your chest, upper body bent forward (slouching). What happens here is that the entire body weight, plus a good portion of the forward momentum you have, is jammed straight into the ground, and because the knee is straight and the hip muscles don't engage properly, the impact force ends up hitting the bones and joints, all the way from the feet up into the hips and lower back, and even up the spine to the neck and head. Bones and joints are not built for this, so you will get in trouble with this. Now, typically this kind of running form combines with a pronounced heel strike; that's because it is essentially a grotesquely scaled-out walking gait: you basically just lengthen your walking stride, add a bit of push-off to turn your steps into leaps, and that's it. Forcing a forefoot strike will not change any of that; it might even make things worse, because one, you will be inclined to "reach out" with your toes, making the overstriding worse, and two, hitting the ground this way with the foot in an overextended position doesn't help at all, it'll just hurt the ankle joint more.


The proper solution is to forget about footstrike entirely, and instead work on a better overall gait. That means:

• Short, quick, light steps, even (especially!) at slow paces.
• "Run tall": keep your head upright (imagine a string pulling your head up, like with a puppet), eyes on the horizon.
• Relax, especially feet, ankles, arms, shoulders.
• Bend the knees.
• Keep your feet behind your body.
• Use gravity to move forward: just slightly pushing the hips forward and down will have you effortlessly accelerate while staying completely relaxed. Practice this in the form of strides.
• If in doubt, bend the knees more.

If you do all this right, you cannot possibly overstride, and rather than jamming impact forces into your knees and even losing a lot of energy by braking with every step, you will use your muscles and tendons to dynamically cushion the impact. It's very likely that adjusting your form like this eventually leads to a forefoot strike, but if it doesn't, don't sweat it - as long as your steps are light and dynamic, it doesn't matter at all.