DOWNHILL RUNNING

Downhill running looks deceptively easy. However, from the experience with extensive downhill course such as Boston Marathon, it is very well known how devastating it could be even compare with the flat course. What is the problem lying beneath this?

First of all, it is a skill of a runner to know how to use to his/her advantage and how to avoid trouble running downhill. What is the advantage of downhill running? Oh yeah, everybody knows how easy it is to "fly", "roll", downhill by gravity pulling until you can't handle it. So, from one side, you don't need to put any efforts into running, but from another side, it could be faster than what your skill of running could handle. At this point, the advantage of downhill running is becoming a disadvantage.

So, you have to run as fast, as it is advantageous to you. What is this level and how can you identify it? In Pose Method it is the same elements: the feet (the balls of the feet) landing under the hips, knees bent, high cadence, short support, no push off, pull feet from the ground under the hips, but with several small adjustments for downhill running.

Because downhill is already an existing inclination, there is no necessity to lean forward at all. The body position is straight and feet are always strictly under the body, something like as you are quickly moving downstairs stepping on each small stair. There is no effort to push the body, on the contrary collapse your knees quickly in order to allow your body to shift to another stair.

The main thing during shifting the body from one foot to another is to not resist with your quads muscles and stay on a support long, because it immediately will overload your knees. Your feet should not leave the "underbody" position at any speed otherwise it will inevitably create "high impact" body position on a ground with the foot ahead of the body and eventually lead to different kinds of injuries.

Actually, downhill running requires a relaxed and soft body much more then even flat running. But together with softness of the body you need to keep your feet quickly interacting with the ground. During downhill running the up & down movement of your feet should be much lower then in flat running.

A very important role is played by hips position, which should be very stable and well connected with the upper body and your feet to support high stride frequency.

Arms should be reactive and connected with the feet to keep whole body working synchronically.

Muscles' tension is the first sign that you are loosing harmony between downhill speed and your body providing it. So, you either need to slow down (reduce speed by reducing cadence, stride length - keep closer knees and feet, efforts) or the opposite, increase cadence. The increase of cadence could bring you a higher speed, but if it substantially higher then your average speed on a flat course, you can get problems with shifting your energy supply system from aerobic to anaerobic, for a example. So, you have to think about this as well. Therefore your speed in downhill running shouldn't be much faster than on a flat course, so you can stay inside your trained energy zone.

Dr. Romanov