Good Form Running

Yesterday afternoon I attended a Good Form Running Clinic.  They taught us 4 key points to good form while running.

1.  Posture
2.  Mid-Foot
3.  Cadence 
4.  Leaning

One of the cool things about this clinic was they video taped you running and then analysed your form.  Sometimes you can't tell your running wrong unless you see it from another point of view.  I have to admit I was really nervous about the play back because I was thinking I am probably the least experienced runner here and the owner mentioned she saw one toe runner and I was thinking oh boy watch me be the one.  Turns out almost everyone was a heel runner and needed some type of work.  My shot turned out to be not so bad.  My foot was almost parallel to the ground which allows that mid-foot land.

The trainer suggested you focus on one thing at a time in hopes of eventually mastering them all.  Cadence caught my attention.  I have heard of this in another term in spinning but not with running.  Cadence is the amount of times your feet hit the ground in one minute.  Good form running teaches that in order to be most efficient at running and preventing injury you should run at a 180 cadence.  We practiced this outside with some metronomes.  Currently my cadence starting out is about 160.  But as I get tired it drops quickly.  I can only imagine how cumbersome it would be to focus on cadence during an entire run, so to avoid that I will probably focus once or twice during each run on cadence, maybe at the beginning and the end.  This will allow me to see where I am at and my progress.

http://www.goodformrunning.com/

Turns out you can actually find songs to match your desired cadence.  The website below allows you to search for songs.  I thought this was pretty cool so I had to share.

http://jogtunes.com/

I am not going to give away all the details however if you are interested in taking the class it is free at Track Shack.