Ken Mierke: Hi! I am Ken Mierke, Head Coach of Fitness Concepts, Director of Training for Joe Friel's Ultrafit and Designer of Evolution Running. Evolution Running is a system for teaching running techniques that will enable you to run faster, more efficiently and with fewer injuries than ever before.
In the past eight years, I have coached 12 national champion athletes each of which has used these techniques to enable themselves to run faster. Athletes of every sport except for running, devote enormous attention to perfect in every detail of the movements that we require to produce during competition.
Runners on the other hand, assume they will perform their best simply by running longer and running harder in training. We found that technique plays an enormous role in how they perform on race day.
Justin Thomas: My biggest compliment of the whole Evolution Running system is that I have been able to run faster, more efficient and with less injuries.
Kathy Coutinho: I have never run so fast and so injury free as well as it helped me qualify for the Boston Marathon.
Steven Duplinsky: This is what separates me from the other guys at the race and it's going to take me through college and hopefully into a professional career some day.
Ken Mierke: There are two aspects of running we want to improve with our technique. The first is Economy. This allows us to run faster without expending more energy. The second is Injury Resistance. When another runner beats us in a race, we assume that athlete is stronger. Often, that's not the case. He is just more efficient. Running Economy or efficiency is the amount of energy required to run a certain pace.
Our research indicates that economy plays a greater role in race performance than the ability to sustain a high level of energy expenditure. So the athlete who wins a race isn't necessarily working harder, but is more efficient. For instance, one athlete might run 8% faster than another, but use only 3% more energy to do so. Therefore the additional 5% is from economy.
I first became interested in running economy when I saw laboratory research on the great African champions. African distance runners have dominated the sport of distance running for more than two decades. When compared to other professional runners, they came in average in almost every physiological characteristic important to running. VO2 Max, lactate threshold, Limb Length Ratios, Height-Weight Ratios, Muscle Fiber Type and everything else we can measure in a laboratory. Certainly, these athletes are extraordinary fit, but so are the runners they beat by two minutes in a marathon or 30 seconds in a 10k.
What makes these African runners so great? Most experts in running economy agree that growing up running barefoot plays a big role in incredible efficiency of these runners. Well, I am not suggesting that you run barefoot. I am suggesting that you learn the barefoot running techniques that make these athletes so efficient, whether they have shoes on or not.
So, improving efficiency makes an athlete faster. The other thing we are interested in is increasing injury resistance. Injuries are an ever present risk for runners. We all know an athlete who has lost significant training time and missed races because of injuries. Most athletes rely far too much on their shoes for cushioning.
When we land with our weight on the heel, we completely bypass the body's own natural shock absorption system. The tissues in the calf in the arch of the foot are very elastic, the heel is not. The heel is made of bone which is designed for support, not shock absorption. When we land with our weight on the heel the shock is absorbed in the heel and passed up through the ankle, through the tibia, the knee, the thigh and the hip. None of these regions have significant shock absorption.
Dr. Kathy Coutinho: The techniques of Evolution Running train the body to absorb the shock of impact with running in a much more efficient way through the elastic tissues of the body removing the shock from the bones and that's where it shouldn't be. So in my opinion it's far more effective, efficient and it really helps people run injury free.
Ken Mierke: Our research use testing with the machine called the metabolic analyzer, to objectify running efficiency. This machine measures the volume of air an athlete expires along with the concentrations of carbon dioxide and oxygen in that air and allows us to know exactly how much energy an athlete uses to run a certain speed.
If an athlete changes his running technique and sends a 10 KPR in the next month, we don't know whether he has trained very hard to make himself stronger or if he has really improved his efficiency. This testing allows us to know for sure that improvements come from improved efficiency. Runners that we have taught the Evolution Running techniques to, have improved their running efficiency by 4.5-8%. That might not sound like much but 1% of an hour is 36 seconds. So a 4.5% improvement is over two minutes an hour. How would you like to cut two minutes per hour of your race time?
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