0:00 okay so how many of you watch the top runners on TV in absolute or yet they just glide over the ground and make it look nothing short of effortless some may say they have the perfect run for but what makes it so perfect so effortless or so easy well today I'm gonna be tackling just that and exploring what we mean by the perfect run full well getting out of the door and going for a run is a fairly straightforward affair in fact it's the simplicity of just packing your running shoes on and getting out there is what makes running appeal to so many of us that being said being able to run with some run form well that's not quite as easy that might sound because our unique running mechanics are all dependent on
0:45 things like our strength our flexibility and also how our bodies are built up so with that everyone has differing run form ultimately the goal is to run with us little effort as we can muster as efficiently as possible and crucially without getting injured so in other words the better our run form that easier it's going to feel and this perfect run form that I keep referring to can actually be broken down into a few key areas and today I'm going to start with our upper body posture well you might be listening to this now and thinking what on earth is he on about upper body posture for running writing comes from the legs well you will be forgiven for thinking that but the truth of the matter is actually perfect run form and technique should start from the top down so I'm actually
1:31 going to start by talking about our head alignments this is really key to our technique and form you want to make sure that you're looking ahead towards the horizon I actually start by saying try to look around 20 meters or so ahead of you rather than even looking down at the ground in front of you or up above also think about not pushing your head too far forwards you actual want to make sure that your ears are nicely in line with your shoulders and that leads me on and try and stay loose and relax with your shoulders also often we end up tensing up even shrugging our shoulders up and that's going to cost us and waste some very valuable energy now I definitely full file to this a very often particularly as I get tired and a tactic that I've learned is actually just to relax our arms down shake them out and try and get our shoulders and arms relaxed and try and bring those
2:17 arms back in and hopefully with that you have some nice relaxed shoulders we're talking about the arms it's actually often forgotten they're crucial and helping to propel our body forward in fact the way that we move our arms can either make us faster or it can slow us down now we want to make sure that our elbows are nice and close to our side not squeezing our side should be fairly relaxed we also want to have our thumbs up words rather than across or down or something like that and then imagine a knit line down the middle of our body and a hand doesn't cross that line now talking about our hands again this is an area that's often forgotten but you really don't want to fall into trap of tensing those hands up particularly you're doing a hard effort or in your in the middle of a race all that serves to do is waste more of that valuable energy
3:03 and maybe you can increase tension in the upper body or the arms when I'm moving on to our next key area and this is our posture now an all too often heard phrase is run tall or running tool but what does this actually mean well for many of us we spend most of our day sat down either at desk at the wheel of a car or perhaps merely for the luckiest were out there on the sofa but regardless of what is or why we do that unfortunately this can leave us with fairly rounded shoulders and flexed hips which can transfer over into our running fall because by sitting in this position it ends up with fairly tight hip flexors which is then going to inhibit our ability to activate our glutes and over time that's going to
3:49 weaken those gluts because we're not activating them obviously this is not ideal and certainly not going to work for our running and improving our run form now something I've always worked on with my running form and a way of countering this is to imagine that I'm attached to some sort of pulley that's up in the sky somewhere and that's pulling me upwards from my chest and that is then going to open up my hips now on that note there was a simple drill that I found worked really well to kick-start that good posture and I do a few times prior to a hard run session I think about standing tall hands on hips eyes facing forwards to the horizon and then rise up onto the balls of my feet and then start to gradually fall forward whilst focusing on maintaining that
4:36 proper posture as I ran through the stride at a good pace [Music] well my last role there actually leads me very nicely onto our next big key area and this is our landing mechanics now with that last drill we are very much utilizing gravity as we started to fall forwards but a nice progression of that is the pose running method now this is essentially the same we're trying to align our shoulders hips knees and toes all together and this time we're on one leg and we're momentarily balancing on one ball of our feet before we fall forward using that gravity and then alternating as we go from leg to leg and this is actually a method that's used by a lot of top-level elite runners but how
5:23 that foot lands is a huge topic for debate four foot mid foot or heel strike well we tend to advise against Hill striking given that it can increase the amount of force and impact up through that limb you can also create a bit of a braking force particularly if that foot is landing out in front of us and let's not forget it can increase our contact time on the ground given that we've got to roll through the entire foot rather than mid foot or four foot which is a lot quicker in terms of contact time that being said we do see all types within the elite running field hillfort mid foot four foot but one thing that is similar and is consistent across all of them is where their foot lands we'll see all of them with their foot landing under their center of gravity which is going to enable that momentum carrying
6:09 forward which again is very similar and aligns very nicely with the pose running method well there we go perfect run form is a combination of good posture aligned in a linear fashion from a head to the balls of our feet and actually a nice couple of cues for you to take away and use whilst you're out running is to think about running tool and the use of gravity and that's going to really help to keep that momentum going which I've been mentioning over and over again during this video and it's not actually the world-class athletes that can only aspire to having perfect run form hopefully you guys out there can too if you have enjoyed today's video hear that thumbs up button and if you'd like to see more from GTN you can click on the globe and subscribe if you'd like to see our Hill training video you can see that by clicking just down here if you'd like to see our 10k - half
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