Running Technique Without a Coach or Camera

[Music] today my dear viewers we are talking about a subject near and dear to my heart that is right coaching our running technique without a coach or camera at your side of course it's great to get a gait analysis or to have a coach watch you run on the track but we don't always have that luxury so we need to figure out how do we internalize some of those things and make ourselves better runners that's it exactly what today's video is all about stick around you might learn [Music] hey thanks to aftershokz headphones for sponsoring today's video stay tuned for a little later on just to hear a little bit more about why we like these headphones so much and how they could be a great addition to you and your running now let's get into your running technique without a coach watching you or having some sort of mirror or camera giving you some sort of assistance which in reality is most of our running 90% of the time even I'm the most elite runner I'm not getting scrutinized every single step and it's in those minutes and hours when people aren't watching us that an effect are the most valuable so these ideas are simple powerful because you can do them all the time and you don't need all these extra tools although if you can jump in there do some of those things I highly recommend doing it now we're gonna get started here just to get into our running with a full body scan so this is the first one thing that we want to do to improve our running technique without a coach or camera is to do a full body scan I'm gonna do this standing but I can also do this every five to ten minutes into my run I can check now if you've watched any of our videos before you notice that we like to start with our running technique from a top down situation so we like to talk about the head the shoulders the arms before we finally get to your feet the first thing I'm going to talk about guys is your head position now most living day-to-day throws our head position in a place that is not ideal for where we are running ideally our head should be nice and neutral chin is up and ears are stacked over shoulders hips knees and ankles but what happens is because we're always craning towards a screen we're scrolling those Strava segments we're seeing where we stand this chin starts to jut forward and then all of a sudden this becomes my new normal the problem with this is that for every couple degrees my head goes forward it starts to throw everything else off so we're gonna get ourselves back to neutral by taking our middle finger and our thumb we're gonna put it on our collarbone we're gonna take our index finger straight up and I'm gonna poke through the beards find my chin and this is gonna be a nice relaxed neutral head you'll be surprised how many of you guys go here or the chin tucks up or does some another thing what we run we want nice and neutral and relaxed and you're just gonna do here just gonna start with five of these where you gonna just shut your chin out hey this is what it might be when I'm reading emails oh yeah I got to bring my chin back and I just want you to notice the difference from position that's not as good to something that's a little bit better next thing we're gonna move on to our shoulders believe it or not we carry a lot of stress around these days and a lot of the stress goes into our shoulders and our shoulders and our traps our big trapezius muscles tend to elevate what happens is when I get in this elevated position my shoulder swing starts to go away it doesn't become as relaxed and this has an effect further down the chain so what we're gonna do is just shrug our shoulders up see where this tense position is and just try to shake roll these shoulders back down and again I'm just gonna do this five to ten times bring them up relax them and just notice hey where are those shoulders can I loosen them up the next thing we're - hey guys is our hips our hips are such a critical position not only for our pelvis can we get our pelvis in a neutral position but can we lead with our hips in our run for that you know sense of Leaning as we go forward so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have just a little little abdominal on and we're gonna squeeze our butt a little bit and when I squeeze my look a little bit this locks my pelvis in a nice neutral position and it starts to shift these hips forwards and I can just rock back and forth five to ten times again just drawing a little bit of awareness here seeing where I'm at my Chin's neutral my shoulders are relaxed and now I've added this hip position finally the last thing we're gonna do guys is we're gonna do a little hopping in place where I am in an align position but I'm relaxed in springing my heels or just kissing the ground just like this notice I'm not here right nice and relaxed and then I can alternate feet and now I've gone that full body skin so again do this before you go out and run check in every 5 to 10 minutes going from head shoulders hips down to your feet so earlier this week I found myself running in the cold in the dark and in the rain actually just right by some of these roads right here and I was doing some tempo work I did a ten-minute interval and ate a 6 and 4 and a 2 while I was trying to increase my pace sometimes I like to not listen to anything but in that particular situation I found that a little extra music and/or podcast was helpful for motivation so to speak so I ran with my aftershokz headphones I think these are the the treks Ayres and I love them because I don't have to worry about you know rain mucking these things up if I do want to take them off I could just throw them around my neck but when I'm in my workout these things just hook around the ear and I've got this you know best of both world scenario where I can listen to whatever I want to listen to but I can also like be tuned into my workout and hear what my body is doing and I don't know about you but when I start running and I start pushing the pace I can get a little ragged sometimes my breathing becomes a little bit more vocal and a little bit off I can start to hear my feet hit the ground a little bit harder as that fatigue sets in so those audio audible cues are really helpful for me to stay focused on my own run technique while I'm pushing myself while I'm out getting through and enjoying this run that I have to say the aftershocks really helped make that happen now let's get back to that running technique so the next thing we need to focus on is our breath and specifically we're going to listen to it and draw a little bit of awareness to it am i someone who tends to breathe loud and raspy when I start to push myself do I have a certain rhythm when I do it my someone who develops side cramps a lot can people hear me from far away am I like that all the time or am I relaxed and buttery smooth all the way through we just want a little baseline of where we're at and now what we're gonna work on is improving it because it's not just the easy runs that I care about but it's what I'm really pushing myself that I want those good breathing mechanics to be there and I need to practice those before I absolutely need them so we're gonna practice by getting into our belly breathing a little bit more now you can belly breathe in and out through your mouth no problem but what I found is a helpful tool for runners is to breathe through their nose a little bit because when they breathe through their nose their mouth is closed it's a smaller airway and it actually forces that diaphragm to engage a little bit more and pull deeper into that belly which is a good thing so we're gonna breathe in through our nose for three to five steps and we're gonna breathe out through our mouth for you two five steps that's like level one can't breathe in through my nose breathe out through my mouth now level two once I get good at that is two now breathe in and out through my nose exclusively this is gonna just make this challenge a little bit more of hey a challenge into my nose out to my nose so I like to start breathing in for three to five steps and out for three to five steps really is just a good place to start there's no hard and fast rule here you can certainly play with it as you go but the most important thing is that you're starting to make the connection with your breathing and your movement can I start to connect those through things together and again the perfect place to practice these things is going to be on your long runs and on some of your easy runs can I get really good and aware with my breathing in those two situations especially the end of that long run because that's gonna translate nicely to the times when I'm running when I really care about it okay so now we're going to listen to our feet and there's a few things we're going to pay attention to no no I don't know if there's any acceptable decibel level that our feet should you know sound when they hit the ground every single time but I do know that as we fatigue that number tends to go up we tend to get a little bit louder with their feet and again when we hear that audible cue there's something happening with our mechanics which is what we want to pay attention to so ideally we want to get a good baseline of where we're at and we want to pay attention to when things start to change as we fatigue so there's a few things that are helpful to think about when we're running there's a moment where we're pushing off the ground but we're also pulling this leg up around through it's almost like riding a bike there's going to be a pushing phase and a pulling phase as we get tired this pulling tends to go away and the push tends to happen a little bit harder so as I get tired all of a sudden I tend to stop the ground a little bit more and if that's the case can I start to think about getting my hips forward and pulling those heels up around with a little bit more activated hamstring that can really help a lot another thing we want to pay attention to is slapping if I notice that my foot hits in slaps kind of hard a lot of times what happens is as I come through my ankle is locked in dorsiflexion and it's not loose so if I'm locked here I'm gonna come down heels get a hit whomp the the toes get a slap down every single time so if that is you where you tend to slap a little bit or maybe you slap going downhill can you figure out how to pull those legs up relax those ankles a little bit more and run with a little bit more relaxed ankles all the way through the third thing I want to pay attention to is scuffing do my feet actually scuff before as they as the foot sort of comes through and what's happening if this one is that I've gotten tired I've dumped my pelvis forward and all of a sudden my foot that used to come through this way because the pelvis got dumb this foot doesn't carry through all the way and hits the ground while it's just would be going a little bit further forward so I've got general stopping I've got slapping where it's the dorsiflexion issue and then I've got the scuffing where it's usually some sort of pelvic position I'm overextended through the low back can I correct this can I shorten that stride up a little bit with higher cadence the last thing we're gonna try to pull this all together with one more drill that's gonna make this thing really hum woo so I am out of the rain and inside to talk about our last piece today which is going to be running with the metronome to improve our cadence this is really one of the last important things we can do as runners to make ourselves better without our coach or camera on our side a lot of times with mid cadence we talked about running in a range of like 85 to 90 steps per minute and 85 to 90 steps is one foot hitting the ground sometimes you might hear the range 170 to 180 if you wanted to count both and running with an audible beep can really be helpful for reinforcing that movement because if my cadence is slowing down mechanically something is off I'm off my posture my shoulders are up something's off with my breathing all the other pieces we've talked about so today we're gonna use a metronome but we're gonna use a waltz pattern instead of just kind of stopping my foot every single time it's gonna be one two three one two three one two three one two three so I'm gonna try to make this work here so now I've got my metronome set to 162 and just standing up all you can hear one two three one two three one two three one two three one two three now ultimately I like that pattern because I'm not just stomping on one side the whole time I get a little bit more of an even rhythm and if I can start to add this into my long runs in my easy runs that is going to be the killer thing because in your speed runs the cadence is already up a little bit faster so it's the opportunity at the end of those long runs and you're starting to fatigue and your easy runs when you can just think about your position and your cadence and your runn technique we can really make a lot of wins there so start with five by one minutes at that waltz tile cadence starting it maybe like 60 ish maybe working up to 62 63 or so stand how that feels and then each subsequent week the goal is to add a minute so week two you're going for five by two minutes week three five by three minutes and try to finish off five by six minutes and then you can start to extend this for longer periods of time the running doesn't have to be fast should be slow and controlled you're really just working on your cadence and if you can do that in conjunction with thinking about that body scan being tall keeping those shoulders relaxed breathing deep pull the speed up off the ground pushing those hips forward you are gonna be in a good position for some good running test number three making sure I look good so into today's topic on la oh my god and you'll be able to notice that you be able to change that back and forth very nice helicopter overhead what's up guys and I'm just getting wet let's go through this is fun today we've got a little special blah blah blah thanks again to aftershokz for making this video happen if you liked this video go ahead and hit that thumbs up hit that like button drop any comments or questions down below we love talking about running technique and of course subscribe to our channel guys we got new videos coming out each in every single week we want you to see them we want you to interact with us and we want you to become better runners that's what this whole thing is all about I'm going to get dry and I'll see you guys in another video [Music] you

Channel: The Run Experience

Views: 232,526

Keywords: the run experience, running training, distance running tips, how to run faster, beginner running, half marathon, distance running, trail running, 5k, running technique, running technique exercises, how to run properly, improve run technique without a coach, running gait analysis, running gait, gait analysis, proper running form, drills for running technique, running technique drills, aftershokz trekz, aftershokz, sage running, running tips, run technique, coach

Id: JGi6BrvR5q0

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 01 2019