BACK TO BASICS

Very often, may be more often than I want to see, I observe people running out of what could be considered an acceptable running technique. The thing is not so much about running technique itself, but about movement in general, which, to put it politely, could be described as lacking basic culture. The whole picture appears to be consisting of lots of different movements barely connected with the main movement – running.

When you look at a good dancer, or any other skillful performer, you can see only the leading movement without noticing other small details accompanying the main one. Everything in this movement is subordinate to the main goal as in a great picture, where everything seems to be measured and proportional to the main idea expressed by an artist. In music performance every instrument has its own place and sounds in harmony with the whole orchestra conducted by a virtuoso conductor.

Our movement should happen in analogy with music performance where our body parts should act as instruments and gravity/body weight as a conductor. Clumsy movement is produced by our body parts/instruments playing out of the main performance by being either not on time or taking a wrong note. So how do we achieve perfect performance? It is very simple, by learning fundamentals, which are basics notes/movements and their timing.

What fundamentals do we need to learn for movement, and particularly for running? It is understanding and perception of running as a body weight transfer in the desirable direction. Therefore we need to know what is our body weight and how could it be transferred in the desirable direction? From this question stems another one: how are our muscles related to the body weight and what is their role in its transfer in the desirable direction?

Our clumsiness stems from our disregard of basics of movement. Simply put, we do not know how to use our body weight and through it gravity. This starts from the most important thing – where and how do we place our body weight on the support, which is our feet, if we are talking about running. Our muscles hold the body weight in accordance with its location, which in its own turn, depends on our thoughts (knowledge) of what a proper location is.

Starting from these premises it is easy to see how we become clumsy runners. If we have no idea what our body weight is and where we are supposed to place it in order to move it in the desirable direction, then our thoughts go in the wrong direction of using our muscles to move our body disregarding the body weight. But we can use muscles in this way only to move our non supporting extremities – legs and arms, but not the body. Therefore unskillful runner produces lots of unharmonious, eclectic movements with legs and arms without any positive effect on his running performance.

There is a great variety of movements fitting this description, such as “powerful” arm movement, leg swing, “fast” landing (by “putting” the foot on the ground), paw back (by pulling the foot back to the ground), “powerful” knee/hip drive forward, push off and so on. None of these “elements” of running has anything to do with the efficient body weight transfer forward, therefore they are out of sync with the major requirement of the efficient running technique.

What are we supposed to do? We have to go back to the basics of movement: we have to understand the concept of the body weight/gravity, their leading role in movement and a proper “attachment” of muscles to the body weight. How do we do it? By developing our perception of the body weight as pressure on the ball of the foot through different exercises where the major ones are jumps (with the rope, hops on two or one leg, and so on) and different kind of balance exercises and Pose stance. Using hips exercises (I would recommend exercises from our booklet “Hips and Hamstring Exercises”) to “attach” muscles to the body weight. By doing these exercises you’ll align your body posture, release muscle tension and eventually eliminate all unnecessary actions and bring harmony into your movement.

Dr.Romanov