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Running, like tying your shoes, is one of those tasks you do best on autopilot.
Break it down into its constituent parts – hold your arm like this, flex your ankle like that – and it begins to feel complicated. That’s why attempts to improve running form often falter: It’s hard to fix one aspect without messing up several others.
A new study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, from researchers at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass., takes a different approach. Instead of asking runners to move their bodies in a specific way, the researchers simply asked their subjects to “run as softly and quietly as possible” – a simple but seemingly effective fix.
The main reason to consider changing your running form is to reduce your risk of injury. There’s plenty of debate about how best to accomplish this, or whether it’s even possible.
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One theory is that shifting from landing on your heel to landing on your forefoot reduces the impact forces that jolt upward through your legs with each stride. But making that transition, whether by switching to barefoot-style minimalist shoes or by explicitly altering your landing, has proven to be difficult for most runners.
Several previous studies have suggested that simply cueing runners to run quietly, minimizing the noise each foot strike makes, can lower ground impact forces in the same way that landing on your forefoot does. The key is that each runner decides unconsciously how to achieve this goal, instead of trying to follow an explicit pattern.
The idea draws on a large body of research in motor learning suggesting that focusing on an external outcome is more effective than focusing internally on your body movements: The trajectory of a golf ball rather than the position of your elbow during the swing, for example. One study even found runners became less efficient, burning 2.6 per cent more energy, when they focused on the movement of their legs rather than the scenery around them.
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The U.S. Army team, led by physiologist Caleb Johnson, wanted to test whether running softly would translate into safer loads on the ankle, knee and hip joints. They recruited 38 men and women with varying levels of running experience, and asked them to run on a force-measuring treadmill while 16 cameras tracked their precise movements. They ran under three conditions: normally, “softly” and while explicitly trying to land on their toes instead of their heels.
The resulting data was complex, but the overall pattern suggested that running softly, like landing on your forefoot, shifts load from the ankles and knees to the hips. That’s a reminder that there’s no free lunch: The load has to go somewhere. But given that 70 to 80 per cent of running injuries occur at the knee or below, shifting load to the hips may be a good bargain.
The takeaway here isn’t that everyone should run as quietly as possible. If you’re running happily without injury, don’t mess with success regardless of how loud your footsteps are. On the other hand, if you’ve had persistent aches and pains or recurring injuries, it might be worth trying a shift into stealth mode.