Creating The Perfect Running Form - Shane Benzie

Shane Benzie is a running coach, movement specialist, researcher and the founder of Running Reborn. Shane has travelled around the world to observe and analyse African tribes, Nepalese sherpas and Arctic Inuits in an effort to uncover the fundamentals of elite movement. He's now applying what he learned to correct and enhance the form of the world's best runners. Expect to learn how sherpas can be so strong, why changing your running cadence isn't a solution, whether minimalist running shoes help or hinder, what Shane learned about ancestral running patterns, plus his breakdown of the optimal head position, foot strike, hand and arm relationship, breathing pattern, stride length and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy The Lost Art Of Running - https://amzn.to/36wiQuu Follow Shane on Twitter - https://twitter.com/RunningReborn Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #running #fitness #form - 00:00 Intro 00:28 Training Extreme Surfers 07:53 Running is a Lost Art 14:45 Mimicking Movement & Form 18:48 Sherpa Strength 31:50 Ancestral Performance Comparisons 36:38 Modern Shoe Technology 43:29 Most Common Landing Mechanisms 47:44 Head Positions & Stride Form 1:01:45 Rewriting Running Movement 1:06:19 Where to Find Shane - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You could spend $10,000 on a pair of trainers. It's not going to make you land with a tripod landing. It's not going to make you leave the ground correctly. We can't buy our way out of trouble. I think it's easier to order something and for it to turn up on the doorstep and we put them on and it's a magic pair of trainers and now all our troubles are solved. We'd rather do that than spend 12 weeks learning to move differently.

• 0:23Chris Williamson?

  Shane Benzie, welcome to the show.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Thank you for the invite.

• 0:27Chris Williamson?

  You were just in Portugal, tell me what you were doing.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I was just in Portugal. So I was in a place called Nazaré and Nazaré has the biggest waves in the world. So it's on the Atlantic coast and it has huge waves. And I'm predominantly a running coach, but actually more and more I'm becoming a movement coach with different sports. And I'm actually working on a project out there studying and coaching some of the big wave surfers. So these guys are surfing waves up to sort of 70, 80 feet. So I'm really get excited about, you know, their foot contact on the board. How are they balancing on that board? You know, what are they doing? What's their perception of their movement, their mental approach to something that's pretty dangerous and that you can't just go out every day and practise because of course these big waves only come sometimes.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  So I use very clever sensors to put in their boots to kind of have a look at how they're interacting with the board and all sorts of stuff. And that does, believe it or not, feed back into running.

• 1:25Chris Williamson?

  What is the similarity between surfing and running?

• 1:29Speaker 00

  So for me, if I'm coaching running, one of the big things I get excited about with running is the foot. You know, the human foot is a very, very clever thing. And I like to think of the foot as the interface between us and the ground. Yeah. If the foot lands well and if the foot leaves the ground well when we run, it creates stability, it creates elasticity, it creates amazing proprioception from the quarter of a million nerves on the bottom of it. It spreads impact, it does loads of amazing things. So if I can understand how the foot interacts with lots of other surfaces and in other sports, then I can learn some very interesting things about maybe how we should land the foot and leave the ground when we run.

• 2:12Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the things that you've learned since working with these psychopathic surfers?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Well, and one of the other big things about sport as well is is the mental approach. You know, that that's that's extremely important. So we're learning all the time about the foot. The I when I'm looking at foot contact in whatever sport it is, I'm always looking where possible for what I would call a tripod contact with the the board or with the ground or whatever it is you're working with. So I'm learning from them about how they create stability in what is a very kind of dynamic situation and how that foot changes based on their interaction with the board. And maybe then I can understand how better we should change and interact our foot as we mo- move over maybe uneven surfaces or up hills or down hills, because of course they're they are on, you know, they're going at some pretty crazy angles.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  So, yeah, lots to learn and lots of information to swap. I did a similar, well, say similar, I had a have a collaboration with British Diving. So worked with British Diving in the in the lead up for the Olympics and just looking at how the divers have their their movement on the board. Not the twirly stuff, that's all really exciting and impressive, but I just worked with them on their three steps on the board and then how they leave the board. So looking at things in minute detail, but then maybe bringing it back into running, something we might do tens of thousands of times in a single run.

• 3:36Chris Williamson?

  What about fear? What did you learn to do with the mindset of these guys? They're running, they're swimming out to go down these sixty, seventy, eighty foot waves. How are they coping with the nerves and anxiety before enduring and keeping themselves in the zone?

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Well, I think I think for sports, you know, for athletes, and and I think when I when I say athlete, I think that's anybody who does sport, I mean, anybody who does anything athletic is an athlete. I think with athletes, I think fear, excitement, being nervous, I think they're actually good things, because that produces adrenaline and that gets us maybe in the place that we need to be. So I think they are good things. I think what the surfers do a lot of, and what I try and get my athletes to do is a huge amount of visualization. So when they come to surf a big wave, they visualize that wave many times and they visualize what they're gonna do on that wave many, many times. So they don't try and sort of ward off that nervousness or that fear because you need a healthy respect for the ocean.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Um, but yeah, they channel it so that it produces a generally that goes in the right way.

• 4:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Their ability, yeah, to visualize what's what's gonna happen and how to deal with it.

• 4:47Chris Williamson?

  I have a friend, Bridget Fettacy, who's a comedian and she has a little mantra before she goes on stage. Every time that she goes on stage, she gets butterflies in her stomach and her palms get sweaty and her heart rate increases. She just keeps telling herself, I'm not nervous, I'm excited. I'm not nervous, I'm excited. I'm not nervous, I'm excited. And I use that. I've done a couple of big things recently and I'm not nervous, I'm excited is a really fucking good mantra. Because the difference between being nervous and being excited really is just the framing that you put around it. Physiologically, it manifests in a pretty similar way.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would agree. And you know, but coming on the show today, you know, there's that minute before you're about to sort of hit that button and come on, you're thinking, okay. And I think what I do, and I think what's good for sport as well is if you get that initial minute right, if you get that first minute right, if you're confident about how you approach and then you've started in control, then you adapt to where it goes. So someone might chuck you a tricky question and then you'll deal with that. But if you start in control and if you feel in control, I think that's good. And I guess that's what the surfers are doing, you know, when they're towed onto that wave by the jet ski. I think they're thinking, right, you know, I've done this a thousand times. This is what we do. This is how I'm entering the wave and I'll now deal with the wave in the way that I have to do with it. But if you start in control, I think that's the best you can do.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  What do people mean when they call you the Indiana Jones of running?

• 6:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so so my work really is, I you know, I literally do travel all over the world um to chase chasing human movement. That that's kind of what I'm doing because you know, if I if I if I watch a runner run, or if I analyze a runner, or I'm coaching a runner, I'm coaching a human, you know, a part of the human species, I'm coaching an animal, if you were. And so I travel all over the world trying to track down what is good human movement. And I trace athletes all around the world to lots of different environments, often extreme environments like jungle, um Arctic, uh high mountains, um Amazon jungle, rainforest, to understand how they

• 6:51Speaker 00

  adapt to these uh extreme environments. But I also spend a lot of time with tribes and indigenous people as well. People who do incredible things with their bodies but aren't necessarily race wearing a race number, but do amazing things. I might go and live with the Sherpas, who will carry twice their body weight all day. Or go and go and live with the Batek tribe in the in the Malaysian rainforest, who are amazing tree climbers. How are they doing that? So humans are incredibly good at adapting their software, their brains and their hardware, their body, to different tasks around the world to suit their environment. But isn't that what an athlete's doing? An athlete is adapting their body to a specific task. So the more I can understand,

• 7:32Speaker 00

  A, what is good human movement, and B, how to adapt that human movement to a specific task, I think the better coach I can be. So I think that's where the Indiana Jones thing has come from, is because I'm just constantly chasing this thing around the planet that uh yeah, it's the hope, it's that that holy grail of what is human movement and how to adapt it and coach it.

• 7:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's interesting to talk about it being a a lost art. I I I'm not so sure what you mean by being a lost art. We've just had someone run a sub two hour marathon. It doesn't seem like running is that much of a lost art to me.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Sure. Well, actually, I was there when when Elwood Kichogi did it in Vienna. I was I was there for the for the sub two. Um and so, I mean, he's a he's a good example. So. You know, he, Elliot Kidgill, he didn't run a sub two marathon because he ran like a hunter gatherer. He ran a sub two marathon because he harnessed all of the gifts that Mother Nature gave him as a running species. And then he maximized as much potential as he could out of his software, his brain and his hardware. Yeah, he turned it into human performance. But because the envi- the environment that you and I live in is not the natural environment that humans grew up in.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  So before I, before I was working, before I was studying human movement, I was working with sharks. Okay, so sharks, so I did stuff with great white sharks. So great white sharks have been around for about four hundred million years. And their environment hasn't really changed over that time. You know, they just swim around, have baby sharks and eat seals.

• 9:05Chris Williamson?

  Water is water, yeah.

• 9:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So nothing's really changed for them in four hundred million years. So they've got amazingly good at swimming around in a very efficient way and living in an inefficient way. For us, for us as humans, you know, that's really not the case. We've been around in a, in a blink of an eyelid of that time. And in that time, we've gone from hunter gatherers to farmers. We've gone through the industrial revolution and now the technological revolution. So we're actually like a fish out of water really now. You know, we, we don't, we no longer live in an environment that we were designed to live in. And so because of that, we're adapting what we do to our new environment. So it is a lost art. Movement is becoming a lost art because we're no longer the animal that we were.

• 9:52Speaker 00

  So we're no longer moving in that way. And what's really fascinating is if you were to go out this afternoon and, and, and run around.

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  It's minus eight in New York City. I'm not going out there and running around anywhere.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  Well, you'd have to run just to stay alive.

• 10:07Chris Williamson?

  Precisely, yeah, that's correct.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  If you ran around Central Park, your movement would actually be based on two big things. There were many things, but the two big things are. The environment that you spend your day in, so you're sitting at the moment. So if you spend a lot of your day sitting, your skeleton is essentially free flowing in a sea of tension. It's two hundred and six bones that don't touch each other. They just sit in an elastic sea of tension. And that sea of tension in your body is created during the day when you're static. You then take that out into dynamic movement. So if you ran around in Central Park, you're actually going to be running with the sea of tension in your body that you've created for the other twenty three hours of the day.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  The second big challenge for us is that our movement is based on our perception of our movement.

• 10:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  And I think, well, I have no perception. I just run. I just go out for a run. I have no perception. We all do, even if it's a subliminal perception. And our subliminal perception of our movement is one that's based on the traditional view of biomechanics, which makes us feel mechanical. The clue is almost in the word. We makes us feel like we're moving as a series of levers and our skeleton is a structure. So we move in a block-like, mechanical way. But actually, that's not the case at all. But because of our new environment, we sit a lot and we're static a lot. And because of our new environment, we are educated about our movement in a way that's based on biomechanics, which makes us feel mechanical.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  So those two things are creating a world that means that our movement is almost becoming like a lost language. It's changing because our environment and it's getting harder and harder for me to have to go further and further afield to find people that aren't looking down into mobile phones and that aren't sitting.

• 11:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  Even in the last decade, that's become much harder.

• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. You have gone and studied a bunch of different groups, looking at their movement, looking at how they move themselves through. And not all of them were runners, right? So the Sherpas, I think you you tried to get them to run and and basically they weren't they weren't particularly fantastic at running, but they're very, very good at strong uh heavy carries, two times their body weight and stuff like that. Of all of the people that you studied, who had the most beautiful running form naturally?

• 12:25Speaker 00

  So the East Africans, I think, you know, you'd have to go a long way to beat the Ethiopians and the Kenyans. And I think for me mainly the Kenyans, I think they move beautifully.

• 12:37Chris Williamson?

  What is it? How would you characterize the way that they move?

• 12:40Speaker 00

  They move with a lot of height in their body. It's elegant. Yeah, it's elegant. They move with elegance. So this sea of tension, in fact, I'm just going to show you this. So this is a kind of, it's a child's toy. Okay. But it's actually a tenseecrity model. Okay. Now, the concept of tenseecrity or bio tenseecrity for you as a human is, as I said earlier, the 206 bones that are your skeleton are free flowing in a sea of tension. So this child's toy kind of tells that story. The wooden dowels are your bones.

• 13:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  And the plastic stuff that holds the toy together are your tendons and your ligaments and something called myofascia. So actually, when you move, your skeleton, it just free flows in a sea of elasticity. And that elastic tension is created by your fascial system. So if you get beautifully tall in your movement, when you move, you move with a lot of elastic recoil. You have connective tissue that runs from your toes continuously right up into your skull. Now, when the East Africans run, they run with beautiful height in their body. So they really load that elastic system and they do that beautifully.

• 13:52Speaker 00

  But you know what's really fascinating and what I think is really exciting as well is that when you watch a picture, the Wilson, Kip, Sang, Ronex, Caputo, world record holders that I've been lucky to spend time with, you know, they move beautifully. But if I was to ask them to list the top 10 things that made, what made them think they were great runners, they would put movement pretty much at the bottom. Which is a little bit disconcerting for me because I'm a movement coach. You know the reason why they put it at the bottom? Is because they don't know they learnt it. Because they learn it by running in the group. So by flow, by the power of the group, by osmosis, by being surrounded by beautiful

• 14:36Speaker 00

  movement, they start to move in that same way. It isn't coached as a technical skill. They just join in with the group, they mimic.

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes, well, I had a guy that wrote a book about Rene Girard, who, you know, his entire thing was this memetic desire, and he saw it as a social phenomenon that we want what other people want to want, and then we presume that that's what we want. So are you saying that there is an equivalent here, but biomechanically, that we see other people around us, we mimic the way that they move, and that becomes a part of... I remember when I was playing cricket, you know, growing up, and you'd see one of the lads that was a quicker bowler than you, or a better batsman than you, or a better thrower than you, and you'd try and pick apart, or at least I would, I'd try and pick apart the little things that they did, presuming that there must be some component of their movement which is contributing to

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  these effective outcomes. And, um, yeah, it makes sense, and that I suppose as well, in that way that you don't need to break it down biomechanically. If you have effective runners in the group, and you run with the group, and you watch the group, then you become an effective runner as a byproduct of being there.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Completely. And it becomes your default much easier, because it wasn't a learned skill. So when you're running so hard and trying so hard that you don't even know your own name, your default is going to be relaxation and beautiful movement, because that's how you learnt it, by running in the group. We could learn a lot from that, a huge amount.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  Is there a, um, is there an implication here that the people who are training and running, especially as youngsters, that you want to get them into a group with other high caliber, very, very precise movers?

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Completely, absolutely. And again, I think it's one of the things that certainly in the UK that we don't do so well. And, you know, and it is a challenge, because if you had three groups of runners and you were going to take them running, it makes sense for the fast runners to run together, the not so fast, and then the pretty slow. But it means the pretty slow never get to mimic the fast.

• 16:35Chris Williamson?

  Precisely. You end up with this sort of them and us scenario where it starts to split out, yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  But what the East Africans do, which is ingenious, is that, so they have the same problem, because boy, they've got some very, very fast runners, and some fast runners are not quite so fast. So everything's at upper level, but there are different speeds. But they do this very clever thing. Where they will have a a grid system. So take you think of something four type like maybe four soccer fields, the size of four soccer fields, and they will have the runners running. But it's it's in diagonals across these football fields or this make the size of these soccer fields. So they run in diagonals. So you are constantly running past world record holders. You're constantly then running behind them, then towards them. You're always moving in

• 17:20Speaker 00

  different angles across these pitches, but you never leave the best runners in the world, even though you're a complete beginner.

• 17:27Chris Williamson?

  And that's why they've done it? Is that one of the reasons that they've said that they've done it to get people around these beautiful running form guys?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, so they can see each other moving. And also, it's easier for the coaches to be in the middle of those diagonals and watch everything that's going on. Nobody really disappears.

• 17:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, of course, because you don't actually have to go all that far away, but you can still run a far distance. That's really, really clever.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  It is. It's ingenious. You can have, you know, sometimes you can have as much sports science as you like, and you know, and as much funding as you like, but sometimes just the simple things are are really, really helpful.

• 18:00Chris Williamson?

  Look at your son's matchbox cars track setup and just duplicate that for a running method, yeah?

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, it it's really, it it works amazingly well. And, you know, people maybe listening to the podcast might be able to kind of relate to this. If you do a marathon or a half marathon, sometimes it's an out and a back. And as you're still going out, the fast ones are coming back. And for that fleeting moment, you see them and you think, wow, look at them. Well, that's amazing. Well, you get to see them for two hours, just constantly weaving in and out. Very, it's it's a great thing. And we we could, I think we could learn a lot from that.

• 18:34Chris Williamson?

  So if that's the Kenyans and they're the best runners on the planet, talk to me about the Sherpas, because they're strong guys. Nims Purja, who did the fourteen peaks challenge, he uh, he was on the show a little while ago, and he's a complete freak, too.

• 18:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, they're incredible. I mean, and this is so I I'd been to Nepal. I used to climb, uh, and I'd been to Nepal maybe twenty five years ago, um, and was in complete awe of the Sherpas then, but wasn't a coach or a movement coach. Um, just thought they were amazing people. But then when I started to become a movement coach and started to think, right, okay, well, what is what is strength? You know, what is strength? I think we in the Western world see our strength as muscle. Yeah, if you're talking about strength, we tend to think of muscle strength. But I don't, I don't see that. I think that it comes from actually a symbiotic relationship between bone, muscle and fascia. That like natural brim's toy, it creates that sea of tension.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Um.

• 19:30Speaker 00

  And who, just like I'd thought, right, okay, well, where do I think the best runners in the world are? Where are the strongest people? Where, where, where are the strongest people? And I'd seen when I was in, in Nepal twenty five years ago, Sherpas carrying almost comical loads. It was just absurd where you could barely just see a little pair of legs and just this huge load to the point where it looked like something out of a cartoon. And I thought, right, I'm going back, I'm gonna study it. And I found an amazing guy. Um, and uh, he allowed me to come to his village. He's a very remote village, you can only trek in. And um, and I stayed in the village and uh, the Sherpas, there were, there were three Everest summits in, in the village and the, the.

• 20:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 00

  Back, well back, cause it was off the climbing season. So I think there's something like twenty four summits between them. And uh, and, and, and was also spending time in the Sherpa community, trying to understand and crack this code. Of why they are so strong and yet actually pretty slight and certainly not muscular to, to look at. And also, why would they carry everything around their head? When all the smart people are carrying big weights over their shoulders, you would think. So A, why can they carry weights that we couldn't even look at? And why are they suspending them around their forehead? That's, why would they do that? That, I found that really, really interesting.

• 20:50Speaker 00

  And if we can learn, I thought, right, if I can learn why, why they can do that, then that's gonna give me some really good ideas about how maybe. Runners can run with small packs on their back or, you know, and I, and I've worked. I've worked with the military as well, um, and obviously carrying weights and stuff like that is obviously pretty important. So, so I went out to live with the Sherpas and to study them and to understand them. Studying the power of the group as well, which I would love to talk to you about, because I think that's massive. It's everything, actually. So studying the power of the group and also how they move. And they really did show me that actually it isn't muscle strength at all. It is this symbiotic relationship between bone, muscle and fascia that doesn't just create an elastic body.

• 21:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Very strong body. And this continuous elastic tissue that runs from our toes continuously up our body actually finishes in our skull, in the top of our head. And that's why they carry the weights around the forehead. Because if you hang something off your shoulders, you've actually cut off the last link of your strength, an elastic chain. By suspending something around your head, you incorporate every single part of the chain.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, they don't know, or they haven't broken down the biomechanics of how the fascial system works. What they've done is they've tried it on the shoulders, they've tried it in their hand, they've tried it around their waist, they've tried it right attached to their knees, dragging it behind them. And they've ended up saying, look, it would appear, so it's just an evolution of what was most effective.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  Absolutely. And if you travel around the world and go to the more far-flung places, people are carrying things either around the head or on the head.

• 22:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, you see that with

• 22:33Chris Williamson?

  ladies carrying water for the tribes, right? You know, going to whatever the local well is and then carrying it back on top of their heads. Yeah, it's so interesting when you see, taking the approach that you have as somebody that does the sports science, you know, real technical analysis of running movement and so on and so forth. But then when you go and you just look at evolution of what was effective, what was it that people did who were good at this thing? What are they doing? How can we then repurpose that? So having to re-engineer our own movement in this way?

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I think, I think it's the way because, you know, a human, six million years ago, we would have been quadrupeds, so we would have went on all fours and very muscular with a lot of muscle. And we wouldn't have moved really very far. We'd have probably moved around about the size of those four soccer fields.

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  Why did we need, why did we need so much muscle?

• 23:27Speaker 00

  Why do we need so much muscle? Well, I think it's a good point. I don't know, because if you were a, uh, if you were a primate, you wouldn't actually need to have a huge amount of muscle to, to get your food.

• 23:38Chris Williamson?

  You're not carrying stuff.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  No, but then I guess if you're competing for a mate, it probably helps to be pretty strong. And really, evolution is about, you know, the strongest or the fittest or the most able to, to reproduce passes on their genes. So I guess through evolution, the stronger you were, the more able you were able to get a mate.

• 23:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, one thing could be that the, the muscle size is less a function and more a signal. It's not that you're actually concerned about what the muscles can do. It's that these muscles are almost like, um, everybody knowing that you've got some nukes in the arsenal. You don't necessarily need to even use them, but if you didn't have them, they wouldn't work as a deterrent. And if you're looking to signal, I am a strong and capable provider to my family. Uh, and I mean, I've heard some stories about two or three chimps can quite easily rip another chimp limb from limb.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  Oh, they do it? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a pretty disturbing sight. And I think it's a disturbing sight because we kind of relate ourselves quite.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  That was us not long ago.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And it can be quite a disturbing thing to, to see. But we took a different, so we would have been six million years ago, those quadrupeds and quite muscular and really not moving very far off those four soccer pitches. And then we did two things. We developed a very clever foot. And we developed the ability to stand tall and get elastic. That meant we could cover more ground with more efficiency, catch more food, get bigger brains, get a space program. Now, I'm not saying we've been more successful than the primate, but a human's USP is a very clever foot and the ability to stand tall and get elastic and dynamic and efficient. So when it comes to playing sport,

• 25:21Speaker 00

  if your sport allows it, we should get as much height in that body as we can, because that's a human's USP.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  Given the fact that the Sherpas aren't jacked out of their minds bodybuilder style guys, what have you learned is, what is the function of strength or what, sorry, what is the contributing elements to strength? You know, if the bodybuilder or the powerlifter or the CrossFitter isn't the person that can carry the most weight per kilo of body mass, it's the Sherpa. What is it that they're doing? Where is their strength coming from?

• 26:02Speaker 00

  So, so it's a good question. So, so strength and conditioning is huge at the moment. Yeah, there's a lot of strength and conditioning in sports. And let's, let's say we were coaching running. Yeah, let's say we were, we were talking about coaching running here. If I went to the gym and I did a lot of squats and lunges and were lifting weights in the gym to get strong, really I'm getting strong at lunging and squatting and I'm getting strong at lifting weights. It's not really taking into account the deceleration as I hit the ground when I run. It's not really taking into account the impact that I create when I run and it's not taking into account the range of motion. So I think what's, what's, what's happening and what's happening more

• 26:47Speaker 00

  and more is we're building strength, but which not that strength is not specific for the sport that we want to do. So a Sherpa doesn't get up at six o'clock in the morning and go to the gym and pump iron to get good at carrying twice their body weight. What they do, carry twice their body weight and obviously they have to build up to that with, with weight, but they do the task. And if I watch the East Africans when they're running, largely I see them running and doing their strength and conditioning on the move. If you run, if you do any kind of activity, you're stressing

• 27:22Speaker 00

  You're tearing muscle fibres, yeah, and you're tearing fascia. They will be rejuvenated, re-architect, re-moulded, rebuilt during recovery.

• 27:33Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 27:34Speaker 00

  Task better.

• 27:35Chris Williamson?

  In this way, in the current modern approach for strength and conditioning for particular pursuits, have we just overcomplicated it? Have we thought that we can use strength and conditioning kit and a hex bar deadlift and a bunch of elastic bands and stuff? In order to create quicker, more appropriate adaptation, whereas we should just be doing more of the specific pursuit that we're trying to do ourselves?

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's definitely a balance. I think there's definitely a balance, but yes, I think we are move, I think there's a tendency to move away from trying to do the actual movement beautifully. And have in mind that by doing that movement beautifully, you're breaking down the body and it will re-architect itself. So it's what I would call Darwinian fitness. Yep, so fitness to perform the task, that that's how we evolve. So if you want to throw the javelin, you can go in the gym and get very strong and build a very powerful body, but that, but that's software and the hardware. It doesn't need to say that it's good at throwing the javelin. If you go out and throw the javelin 20 times, you're going to stress the body and then the body will rebuild itself, allowing you to do that task better.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  So I'm sure there's a balance and I, as a coach, my job is to get the athlete thinking because that's what coaching is. I think if you drill someone, you just get them, someone to do something a lot in the hope they get better at it. And that will probably happen. They probably will get better if they do it a lot. But if they think about how they're doing it and why they're doing it and they take ownership of it themselves and they're very cognitive about it, that's when they maximize their potential. And I think that's what a coach should hope to do is empower the athlete to take ownership of that skill, not just drill them lots of times to do it.

• 29:27Chris Williamson?

  There's something that I've noticed with some of my friends, I'm friends with a bunch of different buddies who are elite level CrossFitters and other sports guys as well. There seems to be, and I want the ones that are listening to take this in the nicest way possible, there seems to be a good blend of thoughtfulness and ignorant stupidity that is important to be an elite level athlete. And what I mean by that is that you need to take enough of a detailed approach of the things that you are doing in order to really be able to cover all of the different bases. However, the guys I know that overthink, they don't just follow the training plan sufficiently. You know, there's a level of

• 30:09Chris Williamson?

  insight and intellect that you need to have in order to be able to talk yourself out of your own training plan. And some people can be too smart for their own good when it comes to training and start to question the things. There is an amount of sort of dunder-headed Neanderthal approach that you need where it's a 60-minute monostuctural workout, just like a zone two or a zone three on a Thursday morning. It's the most boring standard workout that I'm ever going to do. You just need to go and do it. And yet, I've certainly seen friends in the past who will, oh, well, if I can add some intervals

• 30:50Chris Williamson?

  in, I know it says on the training plan that I'm supposed to do X. So is there a sweet spot here between the level of detail that the athlete is supposed to take and then the amount that they're supposed to kind of switch that off and then just rely on the programming too?

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. I think there is a balance. And I think that's where you need that coach to control the overall thing and to be able to say, well, look, this is the schedule and this is what we should be doing.

• 31:15Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  The athlete is the only person on every run or every wave or throwing every javelin or fencing or whatever it might be. So they're the ones that can feel everything. They're the ones that have to make the split decisions. So they need as much ownership of it as they possibly can. Because in any sport, the moment the whistle or the horn goes off, all bets are off.

• 31:38Chris Williamson?

  It's all on them.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, everything's changing now from now. And it's the person that can adapt the best. And if you've just been drilled, that's not really conducive to adapting to something. It will almost certainly happen.

• 31:50Chris Williamson?

  How far were our ancestors running in one go?

• 31:54Speaker 00

  So there's my, the my go to person, the person that I love to listen to and I think makes absolute sense is a guy called Daniel Lieberman, Professor Lieberman. I don't know if you've heard of him or not.

• 32:05Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Amazing, absolutely amazing guy, runner, anthropologist, fantastic. And you know, he was going out to Kenya a long time ago and looking at how everyone was moving. He's absolutely fantastic. So he would kind of say, really about, they would run about maybe a half marathon, at about a four hour marathon pace.

• 32:26Speaker 00

  So to go back to my original statement of Kip Jogi did not break the sub two by running like a hunter gatherer because clearly he would have pulled up a lot earlier.

• 32:35Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  So there was some running, there was quite a lot of walking, yeah. And actually, you know, a lot of times sitting and digging roots and doing stuff like that. So what we're doing now is taking human movement and turning it into human performance. And that's when we have to adapt our software and our hardware. So it's really interesting because if you look at humans, if you watch a human move, humans are very wonky, imbalanced things. A human has a stabilizing leg and it has a probing leg.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 00

  It has a stabilizing arm and a manipulating arm because it's different sides of the brain. Well, that's how a human's designed. But if you want to squeeze as much performance of a hu- out of a human as you can, you need to eradicate those and create as much balance and symmetry in the body as you can, certainly for running. Different sports might need different things if it's a very one sided sport with one side of the body. So we're taking, and this is why it's a challenge, because we're taking this fish that is out of water.

• 33:37Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  That is not living in the environment it was designed to be lived in anymore, and now trying to squeeze incredible performance out of it to do ever more amazing things. And that's why we have to really think about it, rather than just try hard or just do it a lot.

• 33:53Chris Williamson?

  So you're saying that persistence hunting typically.

• 33:58Chris Williamson?

  Would have pulled up at, the animal would have overheated within thirteen miles or we would have lost it on average, something like that.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so we said, so we would have run, walked, so essentially.

• 34:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we would, we would have walked and run, walked and run. So, yeah, but essentially the idea of persistence hunting is you, you get an animal that's technically much faster than you over a shorter distance, keep it in, keep it in eyesight and just keep it moving because it can't carry water and it can't sweat. So it's going to overheat a lot quicker than us.

• 34:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, I suppose, so the thing that I had in my head, because I've never persistence hunted, surprisingly, uh, is that the animal would have just gone and then gone and you might have lost sight of it. But if I was an animal and I knew that I didn't have an unlimited gas tank, I would run faster away than I'd turn around and look and I'd wait and see, are they still coming? Oh shit, they're still coming. Right, okay, I'll run a bit more, turn around and look. So I suppose that, yeah, that the, um, the fact that you would stop, I guess the guys would maybe be stopping to make sure that the tracks are going in the right direction if perhaps they've lost sight of it directly.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Absolutely. They're, they're trackers as, as much as hunters and, and the, exactly. You're not going to be able to keep that animal in your view the whole time. So their ability to track and understand, almost put their self in the animal's position.

• 35:12Chris Williamson?

  Where would it run? Yeah, it's going to steer clear of those trees. It's going towards that, whatever.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And the acceleration and the constant acceleration and deceleration, the stopping and starting of the animal is incredibly tiring. If you go to a shopping mall or if you go to a, a museum and you're, we're walking around, stopping and looking and walking and stopping and walking around and looking, that's actually quite tiring. And it's because of that constant stopping and starting, accelerating and decelerating and stopping. You're far better just rolling along because I think we, you know, even it's interesting with, with, certainly with running is we built up this incredibly adversarial relationship with the ground.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Because we blame the ground for impact and we blame impact for injuries. And and so we try and avoid impact and we've almost become scared of the ground. And the moment we can sort of the moment we can step up and walk across the kitchen floor for the first time, our feet are rammed into shoes to protect us from the dirty ground. And and so we don't have a great relationship with the ground. And yet, when I travel all around the world and see people that are growing up in their feet, they have a beautiful relationship with the ground. They're not scared of the ground, they hit the ground beautifully, creates elastic energy and springs them off. Whereas we're trying to spend as much money as we can to buy very clever trainers that will claim to protect us from the ground and and make.

• 36:37Chris Williamson?

  Yes, I mean, this has been, this has been probably the the most interesting thing to watch as a a non runner over the last few years, it's been the development in shoe technology and then the subsequent litigation that's come in, you know, the the solution that that was

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  created in order to restrict the amount of real estate and and technology that can go into shoes was just to restrict the stack height, right? That was the solution. Okay, you have this amount of real estate to play with, which is where the soul fits. Within that, put a rocket booster, put 25 carbon plates, do whatever you want, but this is how much you have. Because if you look at what Kip Choge broke the two hour marathon barrier in, they're like platform shoes. They're almost comical, right? They're so big, these huge things. So what are your thoughts about the modern developments in running shoes? And then also, what are your thoughts on minimalist running shoes or barefoot running shoes?

• 37:29Speaker 00

  So I think the big thing is that we should try not to get so excited about any kind of shoes and just get really excited about the human foot. Because, as I said earlier on, the human foot, as well as being able to stand tall, the human foot, the very clever human foot is our USP. It creates, because everything we're trying to create with technology is emulating what the amazing human foot has. Creating stability, creating elasticity, spring, dissipation of impact, proprioception. The foot's amazing at all of that. What we're actually doing is wrapping that amazing foot in rubber and then putting some technology on it. So what I would try, what I would urge everybody to do is get excited about their feet first of all.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  Because you could spend $10,000 on a pair of trainers. It's not going to make you land with a tripod landing. You could spend twenty thousand pound on a pair of trainers, it's not gonna make you leave the the ground correctly. So, you know, we can't buy our way out of trouble. It's I think it's easier to order something and for it to turn up on the doorstep and we put them on and it's a magic pair of trainers and now all our troubles are solved. We'd rather do that than spend twelve weeks learning to move differently. So, so let's not get suckered into that and let's let's create let's create an amazing human foot that has an amazing relationship with the ground. And then let's put our foot in a pair of trainers that helps our foot interact with the environment it wants to move through. Because that's

• 38:56Speaker 00

  what the trainers should be doing. Because clearly, our feet can't, we can't run around bare feet anymore. We just, we just don't have those feet. We can't do it. I mean, people do in other parts of the world, but we can't. We don't have that foot anymore. So, we need to utilise this amazing human foot, but then choose something to put it in that allows us to stick to rock or run through mud or whatever it might be. So that the trainers interact with the environment, but we do all the clever stuff with our foot. But that's where.

• 39:25Chris Williamson?

  What about minimalist shoes?

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Well, it would make sense because we kind of want, and we want to emulate, you know, how our ancestors move and move naturally. It would make perfect sense to go to something completely minimalist, because then we'd be there. But again, we're not that animal anymore. And so we have to be very, very careful about wearing something minimalist with zero drop, because that's gonna put our Achilles tendon and our calf muscles under a lot of pressure, because that's not what we've been doing. And suddenly, we've got, we're running around, we've got two and a half times our body weight coming back at us. Because that's what it is when you're running, it's around two and a half times your body weight. That can create a huge amount of stress on the body. The body has to adapt to that. And so if we are gonna go to something minimalist, we, there has

• 40:13Speaker 00

  to be a very slow transition.

• 40:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  Bone remodelling takes seventeen weeks. So if you started to move differently today, it takes seventeen weeks for the, for the bones to kind of remodel and create density where where they need to be dense. So, you know, running around in the park in in so in a bear, in in actual bare feet or something very minimalist can be good fun. Um, but be very, very careful. And again, don't assume that that wearing next to nothing on your feet will make you move beautifully as well, because it it it it doesn't, it doesn't. We have to learn that skill. And then. Choose a pair of trainers that allow us to do it. A very wide toe cap in the trainers is good to allow that foot to splay.

• 40:55Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Or tend to hem our feet in with trainers. So a nice wide toe cap is a good thing to have.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  You see that in, I think, a lot of the shoes that are really architected to try and have good foot movement, that they seem to be, almost if you look at them, kind of like flippers, you know, they're kind of, they look a little bit silly at the end, but presumably that's for the exactly this reason, to give it a bigger toe box so that you have that room for everything to move. So, okay, we've sort of spoken about some of the key principles that you think contribute to great running form. One of them's been this tripod landing. What's that mean?

• 41:30Speaker 00

  So a tripod landing is essentially when you, when we land the foot, if you imagine you've got, so a tripod has three points to it, you've got a point just sort of underneath the ball of the big toe, a point underneath where the ball of the little toe would be, and then the heel, the calcaneus. So you can almost draw that tripod. If you get that tripod landing, tripods give us stability, so we get instant stability when we land. And then the tripod landing allows the arch of the foot to work correctly. The arch of the foot gives our foot its strength. That's why we use arches in architecture.

• 42:04Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  And the arch of the foot also creates a dome effect for the foot. If we land on the tripod landing, the dome effect of the foot works, and we use domes in architecture because we want to spread weight. So, and also if we land on that tripod landing, it means we load something called our plantar fascia correctly, which is a beautiful piece of elastic that runs along the bottom of the foot. We load that plantar fascia, that piece of elastic, that springs us off. And then, maybe the most important subjective, but for me, I get very excited about it, you've got a quarter of a million nerve endings on the bottom of your foot. Okay, there are more nerves in your feet than there are your hands. Two types of nerve endings, extor receptors. The extor receptors, they tell you how hard you hit the ground and what the ground felt like.

• 42:49Speaker 00

  Was it bumpy, soft, rocky, moving? And then you have proprioceptors in that nerve network. They give you your spatial awareness and they give you your perceived rate of exertion, how hard you're trying. So every time your foot lands, those quarter of a million nerve endings are telling you everything you want to know about your environment as you're running over it. So if you get the tripod landing, you instantly get all of that information.

• 43:13Chris Williamson?

  When you say tripod landing, do you mean heel and those two ball points strike at the same time? That if you were to put them onto the floor, that they would be straight down?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  Flat.

• 43:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:29Chris Williamson?

  What is the most common type of foot striking mechanism that you see at the moment?

• 43:36Speaker 00

  So over the, over the last decade, I've worked with over 4,000 runners, many in groups, but 4,000 runners where I videoed them and worked with them. And, and all the time I'm coaching them, also taking data. Up until the last 18 months or so, um, of that 4,000 runners that I saw, 84% of them heel strike. So they land on their heel first on a relatively straight leg. Yeah, 84%. That's, that's now at 63%. So over the last 18 months, that's changed and it's got, it's changed to 63%. So it's coming down.

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  What's happened? That's a really big difference over 18 months. What's happened?

• 44:18Speaker 00

  Well, I guess to a large degree, a lot of the people that come and see me have read my book.

• 44:22Chris Williamson?

  Uh, there's a selection effect going on there.

• 44:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, you'd have to assume, yeah, absolutely.

• 44:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Some worldwide pandemic, we didn't realise that COVID had actually changed people's foot strikes. It's not, it's not good for breathing, but it's fantastic for your gait and your cadence.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  It could be the thing, it couldn't be by not be by book at all. That might be just wishful thinking.

• 44:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  But yeah, lots more people that are coming and I work remote, I work with remote video analysis with people on six continents as well. And even we're seeing it with them as well. So it's coming down. I mean, you could argue that that's, that's not good enough, you know, I should, I should write a better book. It should be better. It should be less than 62. I should up my game a little bit here. But yeah, so that's what you're generally seeing and that's what we see now. And it's interesting because. A human is designed to land on its heel when it walks. That's what a human does. If you went for a walk around Central Park now, you would be landing on a heel on a relatively straight leg and then rolling through. So what happened a few decades ago now is we started running with a walking gait.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the difference between running and walking is when you walk, one foot is always on the ground. When you run, you get air. Both feet come off the ground at the same time during the stride. So we can be running technically because we're getting air, but we're doing it with a walking gait. Jogging, I guess, that's how most people would describe it as jogging. So you, and listen, there's no such thing as, there's no such thing as bad exercise, by the way, you know, it's, it's good to get out and do stuff. Um, but essentially, what, what I'm seeing a lot of is people technically running, but with a walking gait landing on that heel on a straight leg.

• 46:05Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 46:07Speaker 00

  Because I think really, because they're running relatively at a slow pace. And so they're not creating very much air. And so there isn't any air for us to get our legs circling and cycling underneath us. So the leg can only land out front straight. Because we've been told, one of the big urban myths of running, there are lots of urban myths of running. One is that impact is bad, we're all running around trying to avoid that. Well, impact turns into elastic energy and throws you forward. One of the other big urban myths is that air or bounce in your run is bad, is inefficient. We are told to suck ourselves down to the ground. But if you think of your stride, the stride is a curve.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  It kind of is. You leave the ground, you go into the air and then you land. Your stride is a curve. If you limit the amount of height you get in your curve, you can only have little curves. So we're all running around trying to suck ourselves down to the ground because we've been told that's sufficient. So all we can do is land on a heel on a straight leg out in front of us. Which ironically means we don't dissipate the impact we've been trying to avoid by going high.

• 47:17Chris Williamson?

  Interesting, yes. So this sort of shuffle is is a function of people not running particularly quickly and also trying to limit the amount of impact that they're hitting the floor with. I see this in myself, you know, I I've never had running analysis done, but when I think about the way that I run, I absolutely heel strike. You know, I'd think about sort of the pronunciation of the foot and about where I'm striking it. But I didn't think that I was supposed to supposed to land with that that tripod position. What about head position? Because I know that's another big part of this.

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, head position is absolutely fundamental and it's really exciting because it's fundamental and incredibly doable to to to get it right. So if we go back to how a human was designed and evolution, you know, a human was to stand really designed to stand up very tall. Look around for food and make sure that they didn't become food. So the head belongs up with the eye line on the horizon, essentially. And there are so it's if we've talked about this elastic connective fascia, this tissue that runs continuously from our toes up into our skull. We need our head up eye line on the horizon because that creates beautiful tension then in our elastic system. Also, your inner ear, your vestibular area, your inner ear, that's where your balance and spatial awareness comes from.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  So the head really needs to be up where it was designed to be for that balance and spatial awareness to be right. If it's down, then that's a problem. And walking around with mobile phones and just sitting looking at mobile phones, we've spent so much of our time now with our head down. Huge.

• 48:51Chris Williamson?

  What's the difference in weight between your head when it's up and your head when it's leaning over?

• 48:55Speaker 00

  So are you a pounds or a kilo? Who we're going pounds?

• 48:58Chris Williamson?

  Kilos, kilos.

• 49:00Speaker 00

  So your head, the human head weighs, some of that weighs slightly more than others, but the human head weighs around about five kilos. Okay. When it's eye line on the horizon, for every inch forward it comes forward. It weighs another five kilos. So if your head is three inches down, you've now got a twenty kilo head. Now, actually, the head itself doesn't get heavier. It's it's it's a moment thing in in physics. It's essentially it it it's spread. So it's actually the spot, the the upper neck and the spine that is now taking that quadruple weight.

• 49:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  And and so and what and I tell you what's really been interesting is with with the, you know, the pandemic we've had over the last couple of years and people are wearing masks, of course, actually to see your phone. Because the mask restricts your view, people are our heads are coming down even further. So instead of putting the phone up in front of our faces, actually, we crane our head even more to allow.

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  Wow, yeah, of course.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  So that so when we talk, we were joking earlier on about the pandemic and does it make you land on a tripod and all of this sort of stuff? Well, actually, one of the offsets from this, which is pretty intangible at the moment, but people's head positions are changing quite substantially, another probably another five kilos on the the the distribution weighted of your head because of a mask. I can see it. I can see it.

• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  Even though the mask weighs three grams, the impact of the mask is causing you, that is so interesting. What about, um, talk to me about stride length, stride length in cadence and turnover and stuff like that.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  So so, yeah, so cadence, we've all come, we've all got pretty obsessed with cadence over the years. I think because cadence is the first one, the first running dynamic that we could monitor. And and so it's the one that the technology joined in with first. And so for anybody listening who doesn't know what cadence is, it's essentially how many times our feet hit the ground in a minute. And the holy grail of cadence has always been talked about as being one eighty. So we are told that when we run around, we should be hitting the ground a hundred and eighty times a minute.

• 51:03Chris Williamson?

  Three times a second.

• 51:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, and that's true as it goes, but not for the reason we've been told generally. So remember I said eighty four percent of those four thousand runners were heel striking on a straight leg and that's now gone down to sixty two percent. Well,

• 51:24Speaker 00

  the average cadence for that people was a hundred and sixty three.

• 51:27Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  So the average runner, if there is such a thing, is running around at a hundred and sixty three cadence, landing on a heel on a straight leg. And we don't want that. So what started to happen was coaches would get metronomes and put a metronome on to somebody or just get them running at a cadence of a hundred and eighty. So they speed their cadence up from a hundred and sixty-three on average to a hundred and eighty, which meant that their feet would turn over quicker and land more underneath them, no longer on a heel. So that sounds like a good antidote, but it's a bit, a little bit like sticking a plaster over a fracture because you've tricked the person into not heel striking anymore. You haven't changed their gait.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  You haven't really changed anything. You've just made them have stride length of a mouse.

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  People land underneath them. But the moment they try and run fast again or open their stride, they're just going to go back to landing on a heel on the stride.

• 52:23Speaker 00

  So for anybody listening out there who's monitoring their cadence, do not let cadence dictate your form. Cadence isn't about correcting your form. The reason we should get excited about cadence is, and actually the figure should be between, I believe, one seven five and one eight five. That's, that's what the cadence we should be looking for. So it isn't, it doesn't have to be one eighty. It can be between one seven five and one eight five. Because when you're running, when your foot hits the ground, as I said earlier, you have about two and a half times your body weight coming back at you. That impact coming back into your body creates a load of elastic energy in the body. And that elastic energy has a frequency. Everything has a frequency.

• 53:05Speaker 00

  A frequency of creation, store and release of elastic energy. So the foot hits the ground, bang, you've created the elastic energy.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 00

  It softens as you pass over the foot. It stores it. And then as the foot leaves the ground, the elastic energy fires. Amazing. You've created the energy from nothing. You store it and then it leaves with you as you leave the ground. But only if you run at a cadence which sinks in with that elastic frequency. And that's what that one seven five to one eight five is. So if you went out and ran around Central Park at a one eighty cadence, you can be as confident as we can be, and there needs to be more research on this, but as confident as we can be that every time you hit the ground, you create elastic energy, you store it as you move through the stride and then

• 53:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  you chew off with a, with a burst of elastic energy. That's really exciting. What we you would want that. You wouldn't want to be out of sync of that. So that's why cadence is important.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  What should people do with their arms and their shoulders and their hands? This is something that I've never had any idea what I'm supposed to be doing.

• 54:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think when we run, you know, if you if you if you pulled a hundred people in and said, you know, what do you know, how do you run? What do you do? Everyone would say, well, you run with your legs, you know, you use you use your legs to run. Well, you know,

• 54:24Speaker 00

  running is a full body exercise. Every single piece of your body is moving when you run. We have no dividing lines in our our body, only connecting lines. And actually, because of our very dexterous hands, because we do everything with our hands and our arms, they're closer to our brain than our legs. We can see them. I think it's fair to say we have a better relationship with these than we do our legs.

• 54:46Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  So what that means is in movement, in dynamic movement, especially in running, is the arms are incredibly dominant over the legs. So your kinetic movement is such that your right arm and your left leg move together, and your left arm and your right leg move together. That's the way it is. But these very, very clever things are telling our not very bright legs what to do. So if you're running around with your legs, carrying your arms and not doing much with them because you can't really leave them at home, but you don't want to waste any energy with them because you want to save the energy for your legs. The arms just not doing much are sending very, very difficult messages for the legs to have to cope with. So kipsang, kapruto, kipchoge, they would all tell me they run with their arms.

• 55:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 55:27Speaker 00

  They their arms to run. So the arm swing we're looking for is a very, very relaxed shoulder. And all the dynamic movement is done with the elbow. And always to the rear. So the arm is driving constantly to the rear. Very relaxed shoulder, arm movement to the rear, because that's then telling the leg to land underneath you and come out behind you as well.

• 55:52Chris Williamson?

  So you're not pushing the arm forward?

• 55:55Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 55:55Chris Williamson?

  You pull the arm back, you allow it to pendulum through to the front and then you pull back. And then you pull back.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  You never see any air really here, everything is to the rear, to the rear, to the rear.

• 56:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so are you saying, are you saying that your, um, your upper arm wouldn't ever go much past sort of 90 degrees?

• 56:15Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so it's even more than that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  You, because if your very clever right arm drives forward, your not very bright left leg is going to follow it and you're going to land on that heel on a straight leg.

• 56:29Speaker 00

  So many of those, 84% of those 4,000 runners that heel striking are doing it because their arms are coming out in front of them.

• 56:35Chris Williamson?

  Am I right in thinking that by having this slightly more posterior focused arm movement, that it's going to force us into a more open chest and a more upright posture?

• 56:46Speaker 00

  Doesn't hurt. Absolutely right. If you're thinking about, I talk about this center line in your body, which is an imaginary line that runs from your belly button up through the abdomen and up through the chest to the top of the head. When you're running, you open up that center line and put a bow into that center line. That gets your upper body over your center of gravity. It puts more surface area into your elastic system. It brings your hips forward and gets a nice neutral pelvis. And then the arms driving to the rear just completes that beautiful position. You're absolutely right.

• 57:16Chris Williamson?

  What about hands? Are hands fists open? Whatever's comfortable?

• 57:21Speaker 00

  No, this is exciting. So hands. So we want balance and symmetry in our arms because our arms are dominant over our legs and running is all about balance and symmetry in the body. So if you want balance and symmetry in your arms, your hands must do exactly the same thing. If you run with one hand open and one thumb up, the hand will drop and the thumb will go up, you know, the hands, the hands, then the arms are in crazy positions. So what I love to see is if you have your index finger onto your thumb like so, and then the other three fingers just run along. That's it. Perfect. So you would run like that. If you do that, both hands are completely symmetrical. You know that they are.

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Your fingertip, your index finger on your thumb is the perfect tension sensor for your body. If you squeeze those fingertips, you can feel the tension going up your arm, sweeping through your body. If your fingertips are soft, you know the arm is soft. So when you're running, and muscle tension is an athlete's nemesis. We want elastic tension, but not muscle tension. So when we're running, if our fingertips are soft, we know that the upper body is relaxed. If these are tense, we know that the tension is sweeping through.

• 58:37Chris Williamson?

  It's like a canary in the coal mine.

• 58:38Speaker 00

  Completely, completely. And what also happens is your wrist, your elbow and your shoulder, those joints have tendons and ligaments in those joints that are holding the joints together and holding muscle to bone. They do that job, but the tendons and ligaments also propriocept their position in space. So just like the proprioceptors on the bottom of your foot, the proprioceptors in your joints are giving your dark silent skull a position of your arm as you move. If your fingertips are touching, you lock in that proprioception better. So you have a better spatial awareness of your arms if your fingertips are touching. They're also great tension sensors and they do something completely symmetrical.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  That can honestly be a game changer for runners.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  I like it, I like it. What about breathing?

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, breathing is good, definitely. Breathing is good.

• 59:34Chris Williamson?

  Yep, I tried, I've been a fan for all my life.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  That's it. So deep rhythmic breathing into the belly to allow the diaphragm to be able to do the work. If we breathe fast and shallow, we tend to breathe into our chest and then actually we have to use muscles to do the breathing. And the very oxygen you're getting in by breathing in is a lot of that's going to the muscles to actually do the job. So we don't wanna, we often, we often let the movement of our arms and legs dictate our breathing.

• 1:00:09Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  Especially when we're trying to up our cadence in, in that, that's why often it can be a challenge to up our cadence because our breathing wants to get faster to go with this increased cadence that we're looking for. So we, we don't wanna completely disassociate the breathing from our movement of our arms and legs because I think, you know, it should be a whole thing. But I think. What we should try and aim for, and there's no one size that fits all here, but what I think we should try and aim for is to be able to breathe in for three footfalls and breathe out for three footfalls.

• 1:00:43Speaker 00

  That way, that's going to slow the breathing down.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  It's still going to keep it in harmony with the movement because you want the whole thing to try and be together, the breathing, the movement together. We must get our breathing right because if good running is about relaxation and and rhythm in the body, we need that in our breathing. If we're fighting for air, we're not going to move with relaxation and rhythm in our body, are we?

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's it's an interesting one. Is there something, have you found that it's more optimal for people to either end or begin a breath mid stride or as they strike?

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  Never thought about it.

• 1:01:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  Never thought about, I haven't, no, I haven't, wouldn't, I wouldn't drill that, that I wouldn't, it's got to be, this is where you think, are we overthinking this? Because it's, it's difficult enough for your listeners go out tomorrow and try this. It's difficult enough to be able to count three in as you're, as you're breathing.

• 1:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Thumb and the index finger together as they've got that position. Yeah, I mean, it's, everything with this is so slow to introduce, I'm going to guess. Is there a process that you go through? Do you advise people to say, okay, so for your running over the next X number of sessions or X number of weeks? We're going to focus on hands and shoulders. Then after maybe someone's introduced that for a period of time, then we're going to look at cadence, then we're going to look at breathing, then we're going, you know, trying to add too much in at once is going to end up with nothing being done. Have you got a a protocol for how people can introduce things bit by bit?

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. And so one of the big things for everybody to think about here is that if you go out and start changing your movement tomorrow, you are not creating new muscle memory. We talk about muscle memory all the time and we assume that we're teaching a muscle to do a new trick. We're not, muscles don't really remember anything. What we're doing is rewriting our software. We're telling, we're changing our software, which then tells the muscle what to do. So changing your movement is definitely a cognitive thing. Yeah, you're rewriting this. That's quite exciting because I think it makes it, it makes it very doable. We have to understand the challenge to be able to do it. So if you went out for a run, let's say you went out for a five mile run tomorrow, if the first mile you ran beautifully.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  But the last four were great, then actually you're going to you're going to retain the software of the the not great four.

• 1:02:57Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:57Speaker 00

  The start to change your movement, the good movement has got to outweigh the the not so good movement. So that's the first thing to think about. And so that probably means for some people to go go for that little and often approach rather than just long runs. Yeah. So, you you know, if you were running thirty miles a week in three runs, you might wanna run thirty miles a week. But in five or six runs, so half the distance and just do it twice as often.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  Because you're focusing more on the biomechanics. Yeah, okay, okay.

• 1:03:28Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  And are you doing, would you say one, uh uh do you partition off what you're focusing on? You know, for this period of time, we're focusing on one thing.

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think the first thing to really, you know, that that foot being the interface between you and the ground, it's gotta get that interface right, like everything else. If the interface isn't good, everything behind it doesn't really work. So to first of all, of all is to really practise landing that foot well. And leaving the ground well, and then start to work up the body and and yeah, just pick them. It it's interesting. It all sounds like even the stuff we're talking about, I think, well, I've got to go out. I can't think about all of those things. Yeah, the first time you jump in a car, you have to think about the the clutch and the gears and the and the indicator and steering and you think, I can't do it. I can't do it. It's not long before you can do all of that and chat and, you know. So what sensory overload at first?

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  Actually, you get very good at building those motor skills. But yeah, in the early stages, little and often, pick something, work on it when you feel you've got it, add another skill to it.

• 1:04:27Chris Williamson?

  How is it that we've got through an entire conversation about people being good at running and we haven't spoken about lactate threshold or VO two max or HRV or any of that stuff?

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, yeah, we've done well. Um. I'm my, I've got a research project going on with the University of East London at the moment, and that that research project is uh twenty sensors that go all over the body. This is running outside, nothing on a trickle. I always work outside. I think that's another reason why the Indiana Jones thing, because it's only ever research, coach, analyse outside. So we've got this twenty seven twenty sensors that go all over the body that create three D models of people running outside. But we're also collecting mobile gases as well, so CO two levels, oxygen levels. And what we're seeing, even now, in the early stages, is that our running economy. Can be bettered by up to thirty percent just by changing the way that you move.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  Now, you'd have to work pretty hard to get your VO2 max up just a little bit or your lactate threshold up a little bit. Thirty percent, and that's actually unpracticed. That's when they're not very good at it. They go away and practise. So the gains are huge. And when I first studied, when you're in Ethiopia, and when the athletes used to come over to Europe to race, they would come through Heathrow, and I would kind of gather them up, take them to the university, and we'd get them on sort of treadmills, and they'd be putting all sorts of stuff on them and looking at their lactate thresholds, VO2 maxes. And they were always fantastic. But what was always off the scale was their economy. Yeah. The economy of movement. It's good to build a big engine, but if you can build

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  a big engine and take the toll of what that engine's got to do down by using elastic energy, by using gravity, by using other things other than thirsty muscles, you don't need such a massive engine.

• 1:06:17Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Shane Benzie, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to keep up to date with what you do, where should they go?

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  So, so it's Running Reborn. So runningreborn.com. You'll find me there and everything that I do and everything I'm getting up to will be there. And yeah, it'd be great to see you.

• 1:06:33Chris Williamson?

  Thanks.