earlier this month Eliud Kipchoge became the first person to run a
marathon in under two hours absolutely incredible
I can't even imagine running a mile at the pace that he runs a full marathon
well in this video I want to look at five things that we can all learn from
looking at his running form to help us all become better runners so the first
thing I want to focus on is Kip Joey's footstrike going to take a look and see
how his foot comes and strikes the ground we can see that as his foot beats
the ground he's landing with the balls of his feet but doing so with a light
mid-foot strike rather than landing right up in more of a kind of a forefoot
striking position running on his toes as we can expect to see from a sprinter
perhaps landing with a mid-foot strike here allows him to keep contact time
nice and short keep the limb stiffness which is
something we'll talk about a little bit later nice and firm so that he actually
manages to maximize the elastic return off the ground with each stride we can
see as we come forwards frame by frame onto the next foot we can see that as he
lands this right foot again it's very much mid foot so balls of the feet land
first almost almost at the same time that the rest of that comes down flat to
the ground is certainly not keeping his heel off the ground as we see from
sprinters and he's certainly not doing what we see from so many recreational
runners which is landing with his heel first landing with more of a heel strike
or a rear foot striking pattern in fact what we see here from Shura katate the
runner behind him also a fantastic runner finished this race that we've
actually got on footage here which is London Marathon 2019 finishing fourth to
a 501 so again very fast but we can see the difference in running technique here
over-striding heel strike which brings me on to the next point which is stride
length okay so no matter what pace you're running the real key is to make
sure that you can create the striving that you need to run that pacer the
ground you need to run at that pace without
over-striding without landing that foot ahead of a more extended knee therefore
too far ahead of your center of mass kill chuggy here as we can see as he
strikes the ground manages to do so with his ankle underneath a flexing me a
lovely example of what we want to see from a distance runner in terms of
maintaining stride length without over-striding it's when we start to see
people landing ahead of a more extended knee so again we're gonna pick on Qatar
to here but behind him landing ahead of a more extended me here so rather than
the shin being vertical we've got this forward alignment of the shin
this is what we don't want to see in this kind of position this is where we
start to see effectively the brakes being slammed on stride by stride with
his center of mass obviously moving forwards landing the foot significantly
ahead of his center of mass ahead of a more extended knee means that there's
gonna be more decelerated force that the body needs to deal with before it can
move on to the next driver it's going to result in more impact on the ankle the
knee the hip and further up the chain coming back to Kip chogi here in the
white we can see that in comparison as that foot strikes the ground the shin is
vertical if not slightly you know backwards facing and therefore allows
the me to act as it should do as this little shock absorber to help perpetuate
this forward motion as the foot passes underneath the body that allows him to
push off now we know that these guys lots of various different bits of race
footage and cadence does vary depending on where in the race they are 20 what
pace they're running cadence is variable but one constant is they're all around
about 188 steps per minute mark my third point is cadence and the importance of
keeping elevated to the point where you don't need to over stride to overcome a
slightly to locators see from lots of recreational runners
out there so the point I want to make around cadence is how actually effects
contact time and lip stiffness but before we get there it's important to
appreciate that stride length and cadence work together if you're not able
to maintain a high enough paint kind of cadence for the given pace the only way
you can maintain the given pace is to increase your stride length so what we
see here from hip Jogi with his cadence up around about 180 steps per minute
March is that he's not having to overstride to overcome that katate in
comparison okay gives a good example of one of the
strategies that we see from a lot of runners who do wrong with too low of a
cadence they end up throwing that lower leg too far front themselves as we
discussed a minute ago okay now one of the important points around cadence is
that by keeping a quick cadence and by maintaining a short enough stride in
relation to center of mass so knocked over striding it means that you can land
that foot in a position where we're the light little mid-foot strike or again
you can do this with a gentle heel strike rather than over striding heel
strike your heel striking runner not to say the heel striking is bad it's the
over-striding heel strike we don't want you're able to keep contact time nice
and short you're able to minimize the amount of time the foot is on the ground
and as we keep the contact time short what we experience is an increase in
limb stiffness this point where the foot is underneath the hip here this is mid
starts and this is the point where your center of mass is going to be at its
lowest whether you are capture ghee or whether
you're someone who's just started running it doesn't matter it's true for
all of us at this point is where your center mass gonna be held at its lowest
because this is a point where we're going to be maximally or or at the peak
amount of knee flexion that we see during start spades now we're the short
contact time and a more stiff standing supporting limb we see less knee flexion
here from get soggy then we see from katate
now let's have a look with his law of Australia he'll strike the amount in
fact let's just come back to a previous stride here we go let's come through and
look at Katara's right leg as it comes through it makes contact with the ground
now as he comes through starts phase I would argue that the amount of knee
flexion here is more than we see during mid stance from kid Charlie here and
keep Jogi therefore is able to maintain a better degree of think of it as energy
transfer okay think of it as an elastic recoil with that shorter contact time on
the ground to help him explode off the ground with its powerful stride this
powerful back end of his starts phase to push him off on to the next stride now
with that increase in terms of release of a release of 1020 released a stored
energy that comes with that more stiff limb he manages to then spring on to the
next ride without having to overreach and over stride whereas we see with
katate here knowing that as he comes through makes contact with the ground
sinks his center of mass lower deeper into a more knee flexed position he has
to push off harder out of this deeper position and his more knee flexed
position which means that he's not going to get quite as much of that elastic
recut recoil to actually spray on to next drive which means that the only way
he can make up that loss in stride length is again over-striding reaching
out ahead of himself okay so it's the degree of stiffness the degree of
elastic recoil that kept Charlie manages to actually achieve that helps him
maintain this light relaxed smooth running form okay so the next point I
want to make actually centers around upper body carriage okay we're going to
play this through slowly and we can see that there is a degree of
rotation from Kip shogi we can see his hand they're coming across towards the
midline probably more so just eyeballing it here more so the right coming across
towards and be done than the left but they both are they're not crossing the
midline Ken's not this uncontrolled rotation we see from some people what we
see is this relaxed rotation which allows him to actually work in counter
rotation to what his pelvis is doing so as his pelvis rotates right left right
left his voice gets rotating left right left right
meaning that he actually starts to again store the potential energy through
structures that we sometimes refer to as the anterior oblique sling so we think
about as the hips coming back on this side pelvis rotating around this way his
torso is rotating around this way he's going to be getting a lengthening of
tissues you can almost see that the indicative kind of pressing in his top
here but lengthening of tissues on this kind of spiraling a line across the
front meaning that then as he comes through swing phase you see me at that
release of that stored energy and here we're going to get the opposite so he's
driving back with the elbow here rotating his toss around this swag post
rotating around this way and he's going to be getting the opposite effect okay
with this relaxed rotation he's kind of using this rotational winding up almost
of tension through his torso to allow him to release that potential energy
from stride to stride I actually went into that in more depth in a video about
slow flanagan which I'll leave a link to down in the description okay then the
last point I want just to observe really more than anything else is just how
relaxed he looks okay he's clearly moving at a hell of a pace here
but pace as I said at the intro that most of us can only dream of but he's
not looking like he's fighting it himself he looks nice and relaxed
through his shoulders his hands are relaxed his face is relaxed and he's
allowing himself to get into this kind of flow states that I think a lot of us
could just do with working on if you're looking at finding ways to improve your
running technique I'd suggest starting the video up here
which I'll talk a little bit more about your stride pattern and how to improve
that and if you're interested specifically on how to increase your
cadence check out this video which will take you through the process of doing
exactly that okay I'll speak to you soon enjoy your running take care bye now