ABOUT THE UPHILL & DOWNHILL RUNNING SKILL
It is an old topic on our forum, but we return again to it because there are people who still suffer from not knowing how to run uphill and downhill. In spite of a seeming simplicity of this topic there is still no clarity about the skill requirement for uphill/downhill running. The purpose of this article to emphasize the most important points in skill improvement for this specific running. The essence of the skill here is the same as in flat running: how to use gravity to our advantage and how to reduce work against gravity.
In uphill running there exist two major difficulties. The first one is physical, caused by the necessity to move the body weight up against gravity, which increases accordingly the body response by increasing muscular efforts and energy spending compared to flat running. The second difficulty is our psychological and emotional response to the first one and it looks very logical. But our goal is quite the opposite. We need to keep our efforts and energy spending as low as possible (close to flat running).
The technical aspect of it is very simple, we need to run with the same technique: keeping the body weight on the ball of the foot, leaning forward (according to the speed and adjusted to the angle of inclination of the hill) and pulling the foot from the ground. The problem is that our psycho-emotional reaction or perception could be wrong, considering the hill as the necessity to push the body up, in order to maintain the speed, by extending our support leg. Nothing good comes from this action, just the opposite: it increases stress on our muscles and joints and increases energy expenditure.
We need to understand that no matter what we do, our uphill running will be slower then our flat running and our desire to keep the same speed is futile. Any attempts to increase the stride length by moving the swing foot forward or pushing off by the support leg are the same kind of futile efforts. What is really important is to keep our perception of efforts in uphill running similar to flat running. At the same time, our speed and stride length will be reduced and stride frequency will increase. This will save your muscles and joints from unnecessary stress and possible injury.
It could be helpful to use an analogy with uphill biking, where the use of hard gears and slow cadence would be quite illogical and stressful. So to make an uphill biking efficient and less stressful we use smaller gears and higher cadence. This is the exact thing that should be done in uphill running: using shorter steps with the higher cadence.
Downhill running is more complicated and more injury risk prone, though it may not look this way. The most difficult thing in downhill running is to not fall into the psychological trap of its easiness. If we do not make an adjustment of the body position and efforts, we'll inevitably run much faster than we do on a flat course, with all the negative consequences of it: shifting the energy spending mechanism from your usual in flat running to a higher one, increasing the stride length and by this increasing the impact during landing and support. In general, the speed in downhill running shouldn't be much faster, just a little bit compared to the flat course.
In order to avoid all of this we need to adjust our body position from leaning forward to straight (erect), keep our feet strictly under the hips, not allowing them to get ahead or behind the body, reduce quad muscle tension (keep knees softer), quickly pull the feet from the ground, but very low (just enough off the ground), and keep the cadence high. Everything is about a quick change of support (keeping knees bent even more than on a flat course) and not allowing the body to fly above the ground.
As you see, general rules of the Pose Method technique are the same and adjustments are minimal, but this is about the skill, which we have to develop in order to make our uphill/downhill running efficient and injury free.
Dr.Romanov
