It's All About Form

An article from running times online magazine…

Why Running Form Matters

And how you can improve your form

By Scott Douglas

As featured in the July/August 2010 issue of Running Times Magazine

When Bill Rodgers was the best marathoner in the world in the late 1970s, a biomechanist named Peter Cavanagh tested him in his lab at Penn State. As part of the test, Cavanagh had Rodgers "fix" his trademark across-the-body right arm swing. The result? Running with more textbook form, Rodgers' running economy, or oxygen cost at the same pace, was higher. That is, changing Rodgers' form to something thought to be better made it harder for him to run a given pace.

In the more than three decades since that lab experiment, a take-home message from it has been endlessly repeated: Don't mess with your running form. Over time, your body will find its best way of running. The more you run, the more your body will find its natural form. Just run, baby.

Why, then, do almost all top coaches have their runners spend time working on their form? Why do most elites, already blessed with enviable technique, think that working on their form will make them faster, either directly or by allowing them to train more by avoiding injury? And why should you?

Read on here.