Running Technique for Everyone,Dr Romanov.

May 08, 2007
RUNNING TECHNIQUE FOR EVERYONE™: sprinters, marathoners and everyone in between

Conventional, everyday experience plays an interesting game with our mind when it comes to our knowledge about running. We are so accustomed to our vision of “obvious“ differences in technique between sprinters and marathoners that we do not bother ourselves to get any other opinion on this matter. It seems that everything, from your personal experience to pictures from ancient Greek vases and modern art, photographs in magazines, and books, images in movies and TV tells us the same thing again and again - that there are elite runners and everyday joggers, sprinters and marathoners, etc.

So our motto: “running technique for everyone” sounds a little controversial. It is really difficult for the mind to accept that, no matter what speed or distance we do, what age, height, weight or gender we are, what nationality or race we belong to, or what our social status is, the running technique is still the same.

To get this universal vision on running technique, we have to step aside from all these differences and look at them from an abstract point of view, get some general, common base for thinking about running as a specific movement in a specific environment with distinctive, unchangeable characteristics.

The most general base for our thoughts is the assumption that running is a part of nature, where everything is governed by gravity, which fact is known to us, but on a subconscious, imperceptible level. This means that we are kind of aware about gravity, theoretically, but can’t use it consciously, with deep understanding, in our skill of movement in everyday life.

How could this fact be applied to our understanding of similarity and difference between sprinting and marathon running technique? What are the common characteristics? The most important one is gravity, which does work for both sprinter and marathoner in the same way – pulling their bodies, no matter the size with the same rate down to Earth. In the same way gravity transfers the body in the horizontal direction from a very specific body position, which we call the Running Pose, on support.

To utilize gravity we do the same things, regardless of length and speed of running, we stay in a certain position, leaning (falling) from this position and disengaging our contact with support by pulling the support foot from the ground. This pattern of movement is a common characteristic of any running.

The difference between sprint and marathon is the amount of gravity we need to run with a required speed. Utilization of gravity, as we know, happens by allowing the body to lean forward on support, and this parameter is quite different for sprinters and marathoners. If in fastest sprint on the level of the World Record on 100m dash the runner leans forward from the vertical more, then in marathon on the same level he leans forward less.

Consequently, it leads to a higher cadence in sprinting up to 330 steps per minute and for the best marathoners it is around 180-190 during steady pace. As it’s easy to see, these differences require different level of muscular strength and accordingly developed body shape.

What kind of conclusion can we draw from this for our practical use? It is very simple: our running is not free from gravitational force influence, which is supposed to have some impact on our running, no matter our differences in fitness, size, or weight. This impact is the same, but using, utilizing it, differs due to our running task, fitness level, our size and weight.

Gravity works constantly and perfectly, but our skill, fitness level, size and weight in most cases do not meet gravity’s requirements. The degree of deviation from this requirement determines the level of our running skills and abilities. This makes us average or elite runners, sprinters or marathoners.

The Pose Method of running is built on gravity’s requirements, which do not differentiate between people running with various speed or distance of running, but on the opposite, on common ground for everyone – on using gravity as an active force in our running. So the problem is how to accommodate it for an average or overweight person? The first condition for this accommodation is to develop understanding and practical use of this knowledge, where restriction is only our level of skill.

Dr.Romanov