I’ve come to realize that my running style is very vertical, up & down. It’s been described as almost ‘jumping’. This is definitely very inefficient, and in part accounts for my very slow running times.
What advise can you offer? Are there exercises, drills, good websites, books? Things to think about while running?
Many thanks!!
Chi Running might be a good read for you.
I have never practiced it but if you have access to a gym with treadmills and those treadmill are facing mirrors, the “up and down” should be glaring and you can modify your stride to remove it.
Another thing that I have done is reading the newspaper while running. I had heard about it from an Adventure Racing coach: he would give a newspaper article to the athletes going for a run and they would have to summarize it when they came back. The goal was different: learn to read a map while running but you have to reduce vertical movement to be able to read. I guess you could do something similar, say hold a glass of water (in a paper cup) and don’t spill it or something.
One last idea, again on a treadmill: a friend of mine does the following exercise from time to time. She wears a HR monitor, set the treadmil to a given speed, and for given period of time/distance (800m, 3-4 minutes), she’ll try to take her HR down by making her stride as efficient as possible. That should force you to reduce the vertical motion as well.
My .02,
Alex
Probably plenty of great drills that people will suggest that will be helpful, but I’ll bet if you simply just concentrate on increasing your cadence you’ll naturally find yourself doing less bouncing. If you can run at 180 steps/minute, you’ll naturally shorten your stride and won’t be able to jump up and down excessively.
btw I don’t know that 180 is THE magic number, but the point remains the same.
I’ll second the www.chirunning.com recommendation.
I agree - increase your cadence.
In order for one to run with any type of a normal heart rate at a cadence of 180, one will have to shorten their stride. It is the shorter stride that keeps vertical motion at a minimum. Running is essentially ballistic motion with every step, so, the less time you are in the air between steps for a given forward velocity, the lower your vertical displacement will be for that given velocity.
Note to the original poster, this will feel very ackward at first. But it gets easier. Get a metronome.
Check out this article at trifuel.com
http://www.trifuel.com/triathlon/run/creating-efficient-horizontal-propulsion-000985.php
Creating Efficient Horizontal Propulsion
Source: Ken Mierke
Despite what most runners and their coaches believe, technique plays an enormous role in sustained fast running. Most runners’ subscribe to one of two basic paradigms of propulsion. Unfortunately, both are flawed. One creates more upward propulsion than forward and the other isolates a relatively small, weak muscle group instead of harnessing a number of muscles to work together to produce propulsion. Learning to use large muscle groups to create horizontal propulsion with minimal vertical oscillation will help you run further and faster.
Upward Thrust Method
One challenge for runners is creating propulsion as close to purely horizontal as possible. Excessive vertical displacement increases the energy cost of running dramatically. The most common method runners use to develop propulsion is the upward thrust. At toe off, the knee is straightened forcefully, thrusting the body up and forward.
This technique wastes a tremendous amount of energy, leads to local muscular fatigue in the quadriceps, and slows turnover.
As indicated by the large black arrow in the illustration, the direction of the force created by extending the knee is slightly forward, but mostly upward. The extended flight time decreases turnover, more than offsetting the slight increase in stride length, resulting in slower running speed and increased energy cost. This up and down method of running, employed to some degree by most runners, is extremely inefficient. If an athlete’s quadriceps fatigue during long runs even at easy pace, he probably subscribes to the upward thrust paradigm of propulsion.
The quadriceps muscles work in the vertical plane. On flat ground, the quadriceps should only contract at the moment foot-strike to hold the body up. The quadriceps should minimize knee bend at foot-strike, catching bodyweight, but should not create propulsion. This is especially important for triathletes, who must run with quadriceps fatigued from the bike.
Pull Through Method
Another common error of propulsion is the pull through. This runner avoids the upward thrust push-off, instead creating propulsion by bending the knee and pulling his body forward with the hamstring muscles. This running style is reasonably energy efficient; it does minimize vertical displacement and landing impact. The problem with this running style is the demand that it places on the hamstring muscles.
The hamstring muscles are a relatively small and weak muscle group. When they are almost exclusively responsible for propulsion, they fatigue easily. Using larger muscles, along with the hamstrings, enables a runner to take advantage of the benefits of the energy-efficient (horizontal) style, but prevents local muscular fatigue in the hamstrings by spreading the workload over greater muscle mass.
If an athlete suffers from hamstring fatigue or cramping during long or hard runs, while the rest of the body feels fairly comfortable, he probably uses pull-through propulsion. Learning to engage more muscle for propulsion while maintaining the horizontal movement will increase speed and endurance.
Foot Drag
The two common errors of creating propulsion for running involve movement at the knee. Optimal technique for creating propulsion when running on flat ground requires a constant knee angle through the propulsive phases of the stride cycle.
I call the recommended technique the foot-drag movement. It involves pivoting the leg backward from the hip with the entire leg as a fixed unit. The knee should be slightly bent, but the knee angle should not change from just before foot-strike, through the period of contact with the ground, to the follow-through. Through the entire propulsion phase, the knee angle should be slightly bent and constant. This technique accomplishes a number of goals of efficient, fast, sustained running.
First, the foot-drag movement creates almost perfectly horizontal propulsion. Vertical displacement, and all the problems associated with it, can be minimized. Newton’s Law states that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. It follows that, in order to create horizontal propulsion, we must pull straight back against the ground instead of pushing down into the ground. The foot-drag movement accomplishes this goal.
The foot-drag movement also takes advantage of the attachment points of the muscles on the posterior aspect of the hips and thighs and spreads the work of propulsion among a much larger muscle mass than other methods of propulsion. Using greater muscle mass to accomplish a certain amount of work decreases the relative intensity of the work for each muscle. If more muscles are doing the same amount of work, each muscle is working more easily.
The hamstring muscles are unusual in that they cross two major joints. The hamstrings attach above the hip, cross both the hip and the knee joints, and attach below the knee. Due to this unique attachment, they serve two major functions: extending the hip joint and flexing the knee joint. The gluteus maximus muscles, on the other hand, cross only one major joint, the hip. The glute muscles only major action is hip extension.
The pull-through method of propulsion creates nearly horizontal propulsion, but it fails to engage the largest and strongest muscle in the body, the glutes. Which do you think would be stronger, your hamstring muscles, or your hamstring muscles and your glutes working together? That answer is obvious. If knee flexion is the primary producer of propulsion, the hamstrings have to create the force by themselves. By using hip extension instead of knee flexion to create propulsion, the hamstrings work in conjunction with the glutes, therefore each muscle is required to produce less force. Obviously, this minimizes fatigue.
Pull-through runners frequently have extremely tight hip-flexors, preventing correct hip extension. Stretching these muscles will enable you to incorporate better technique for developing propulsion, allowing you to create high levels of horizontal propulsion without local muscular fatigue.
Developing a stride which uses hip extension as the primary method of propulsion will enable runners to move more horizontally and to use large muscle groups to do the work. This will allow you to run farther and faster that ever before.
Ken Mierke has a good DVD just out, discussing this very topic. Although I don’t remember the name exactly (sorry), it is very good.
He posts here from time to time, maybe he can be our resident ‘Doug Stern’ for running!
Ken Mierke is indeed top notch. I had the benefit of some time with him just this week. It was a follow up from a prior bike fit assessment focusing on my knee troubles. He knows his bike stuff, and went beyond the bike work to check out my run gait/form. I think he’d put me in the “pull through” category from the article above.
When I managed to get striding as he wanted, I felt like I was flying. To get me there he put me on a treadmill and put a strap around my hips and pulled from behind to get some resistance. Ken, if you are reading, sorry if I’m giving away your secrets!
In short, he is top notch with bike stuff as well as run. He is kind of known in the DC area as THE bike guru, and seems to have an even wider rep with run stuff. I couldn’t be happier with his work with me. If I can ever afford a coach he will be the guy. So I’d wager his dvd mentioned above is a worthwhile resource. Damn, I can feel a purchase coming on…