Jack: Okay Jodie, now I'm going to show you something on the treadmill about stride lines. Experts want to teach you, increase your stride lines to increase your speed, but here, I'm going to show you, it’s just the opposite that you try to keep your stride unto as short as possible in order to be able to handle more speed.
Jodie: Okay.
Jack: Now, I'm going to start up the treadmill.
Jodie: This should be interesting because traditionally, what he is saying is just the opposite of what I do.
Jack: Okay, now, here when I land and the ground doesn’t move me away from me, the ground is what flips the leg back, like that and you’re supposed to shorten it, keep it from going too far back. And bring it back not too far ahead because you want to have vault again at the same speed. So, what you do is you step down and the cutoff your stride lines as much as you could, leave your foot down.
Jodie: Okay.
Jack: And instead of brining it up like this—like what they want you to do—
Jodie: Waisting time.
Jack: And waisting time.
Jodie: And energy.
Jack: Right, energy is right. Okay, now you want to try that and see if how that feels.
Jodie: This is how normally it would kick back.
Jack: Right.
Jodie: Are you saying that I should just—?
Jack: That’s it
Jodie: It saves a lot of time.
Jack: Yeah
Jodie: And a lot of energy, yeah, I can see that. Okay, what's next?
Jack: Okay, what I'm going to show you is something else on the treadmill, and that is, I'm going to that to start up with no stride at all and as the speed increase, I'm going to be running with no stride at all, and as the speed increases, my stride is going to be forced to increase. But I'm going to try to keep it short in spite of the fact that it has to go faster.
Jodie: Okay.
Jack: Okay now. So, I’ll pick it up to eight on the treadmill. We’ll just start off here like that, and you notice that I am starting off with no stride at all. See, and then my feet start spreading apart more and more as m going faster.
Jodie: It’s a very soft running, I don’t hear any sounding at all of what you’re doing.
Jack: Because I'm touching the ground and then falling.
Jodie: Wow!
Jack: After I touch the ground.
Jodie: That could be very beneficial for people with bone problems.
Jack: Yes, all these things that I was showing you are things that related to have a soft run and so much less impact.
Jodie: Wow, that’s great.
Jack: Okay, now, let’s go over here and we’ll try something else. When you run slowly, a medium stride is more comfortable than a short choppy stride. As the speed increases, the foot flips back further and you have to work harder with a body twist to exchange the feet. You cannot do anything at one angle as the common ‘feed’ tells you to do. By the time the body changes angles, lifting yourself up in the air would take a 100 different angles, so it is impossible to do anything at one angle with your leg and body at one angle head to toe.
In a sprint, you take to the air with both feet as soon as you get out of the starting box that is so, you can keep landing behind your weight for the whole time you are increasing speed with each step. The feet are forced to spread apart wider with each stride by the speed of the receding ground. The foot going back is flipped by the ground and the foot going forward is pushed off the hip by the body twist.
In the walking process, the twist is done very easy for the feet to keep our belly with the speed of the body. When you reach your maximum walking speed, your legs won’t let you move any faster, that is because your feet are forced to spread apart and can’t exchange fast enough to catch you. Your sense of balance hold you back so you won’t fall. To go faster, you have to do the same thing you do walking, except you have to take to the air with both feet. The only reason you take to the air is to give yourself the additional time needed to exchange your feet.
To increase speed on the grounded foot and let our body fall ahead. Now, gravity is pushing that at our back much harder. Jodie, running the old way she was thought is, always striding lifting a feet way too high and knees too high. You can’t run fast the conventional way, tossing yourself up in the air for long stride makes you run slower. The longer strides you can take makes you go the slowest. You cannot run fast by striding long and jumping high.
Okay, Jodie, now I'm going to show something about how you should land, whether you land flat or whether you and on your heels or whether you land on your toes. Now, for distance running, you should be landing flat, because if you land on your toes, your cuff muscles can’t really handle the stress as much as your quadriceps can because the leg is practically straight when you’re landing. But if you’re landing on your toes, there is a total angle to it that makes more stress on the muscle, the leverage is much greater on the cuff muscle if you’re running on your toes and you can only do that for a short distance. It’s the efficient place to be actually to go forward, bu you won’t want to do it for distance running, just sprinting.
Jodie: Okay.
Jack: Okay, now, if you land on your heels, what happens is, you point up on your toe with all that weight coming down and with your shin muscles, and your shin muscles are working very hard and a lot of people have problems with their shins—
Jodie: Shins point.
Jack: Shins points, right.
Jodie: Okay.
Jack: Okay. So, what you want to do is spread the force of the landing across a wider area which a three pads at the feet.
Jodie: Where would that be?
Jack: Okay. One pad at the heel and two pads just behind the toe.
Jodie: Okay.
Jack: On the feet. Okay, now, there is no need to roll on the foot like they tell you to because the ankle rotates. So, you could be vaulting with the ankle rotating and you don’t have to land on your hill and roll beside, which when you land on the heel, it’s not a stable platform and you tend to pronate or supinate—
Jodie: Oh, that’s a lot of problems for runners, lots of runners have problem with the supination and pronation, they have to get orthotic—
Jack: It’s not a stepping point.
Jodie: Yeah.
Jack: But if you are landing flat, your foot is stabilized on the ground.
Jodie: Okay.
Jack: And you’re not going to pronate or supinate that easily.
Jodie: Well, that makes sense.
Jack: Okay. Now, Jodie, you see that each—here, we see Jodie Hawkins running in a National Masters’ Race. She has been training and racing with my technique. The person behind her, the woman behind her is a four-time—fifteen-time world triathlete champion.
Jodie won the National Masters’ Championship and she did it by dropping her feet less in front on average than anyone else in the raise. That’s the way every champion wins. To reach your pace, you have to keep dropping your feet behind your upper body’s center of balance, that way you pick up speed with each step. Once you reach your level of pace, you drop your feet less in front than anyone else, and that’s the way you win the race.
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