Chances are you were never taught how to run. You’re born, you learn to crawl, progress to a walk, then something inside tells you to go a bit faster: hey presto, you’re running.
Entering adulthood, many people take this practice and turn it into a hobby or exercise, racking up the miles each week to boost their fitness levels – not to mention their mood. But according to a top running coach, beginners in particular could improve their performance with just a few small tweaks to their technique, helping them run faster and further with a lower risk of injury.
“There is high-level running form advice which can help beginners,” says Ben Parker, head coach and co-founder at training app Runna. This advice can be split into three main categories; your contact point with the floor, arm swing and cadence.
Below, Parker breaks down each one to help you fine-tune your technique.
How to improve your running form
Contact point with the floor
“Be mindful of your contact point with the floor,” Parker tells me. “Typically, people who sit at a desk all day are going to have tight hips, meaning they’re going to lean forward when they run so their bum sits further back behind them. As a result, they’ll slam their heel into the floor [with each stride].”
Our ancient ancestors would have naturally avoided this form as doing it barefoot would be uncomfortable. But with the development of thick-soled spongy running shoes to help us roll through each stride, we can now get away with it.
“The problem now is, if someone has this seated desk posture and they wear really thick, spongy shoes, they don’t find pain in that, and then they reinforce that practice over time, which is bad,” Parker says.
To fix this, he recommends staying tall while running, keeping your chest up and shoulders back while driving your hips forward and looking where you’re going. Doing this should see your feet land underneath your hips, rather than out in front of you, with each stride.
“That should hopefully hold you in a nice, strong body position so that when you lean forward to run, it will naturally mean most of your force will land through the balls of your feet.”
However, he adds, while this is solid general advice, there will always be variations in optimal running form from person to person.
“We want to try to land naturally while also utilising the structures in our body – the muscles in our feet, calves, ankles etc. – and avoid slamming the bony part of our foot into the floor, locking out at the knee and jarring up through the knee and the hip.”
Read more: 10 tips for running your first marathon from professionals who’ve gone the distance
Arm swing
The first tip worked from the ground up. Now it’s time to look a little higher and tweak your running form in your upper body.
“You want to think about swinging from the shoulder rather than swinging from the elbow,” Parker says. “Hold a 90-degree bend in the elbow, then rock from the shoulder naturally, allowing some rotation towards the middle of the body so it feels natural.”
However, for maximum efficiency, you want to avoid allowing your arms to cross the centre line of your body, he adds.
“As soon as we start twisting too much, we’re wasting our energy because we’re going to be rotating [excessively] in the body which might lead to our knees and hips rotating inwards, which is not what we want,” Parker explains. “We want our energy to travel forwards. Avoiding too much lateral movement with the arms will keep the legs moving in a forward direction, avoid wasting energy and avoid increasing risk of injury as well.”
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Cadence
Cadence refers to your step speed, or the number of steps you take per minute. Most modern smartwatches and fitness trackers will provide feedback on this as you run.
“We’re looking to keep our cadence relatively high,” says Parker. “The gold standard we are aiming for is 180 steps per minute. Any modern smartwatch will be able to play a metronome to help you run to that number. A more accessible solution is just going on YouTube and finding a 180 beats per minute metronome sound to run to.”
Again, individual physiology and other factors unique to you will be a factor here. If your natural cadence falls well short of the 180 steps per minute gold standard, Parker recommends progressing it incrementally over time.
“If you find that your cadence lands at 160 steps per minute, you might want to try running at 165 for a while, then 170, and gradually building up to 180,” he says. “People will often find their cadence is a little higher when they are running faster, but we should be looking to keep a high cadence even with easy running – that would imply good running form.
“More, lighter, steps is going to mean less impact with each step, less likelihood of injury and probably more efficient running to help us run further and faster,” Parker advises.
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