Is it good advice? Bad advice? Or just advice that should be reserved for specific instances?
Discuss.
Discuss.
For me focusing on lifting my feet messed me up for a long time. The advise of moving my arms at a high rate worked better for me because then my stride shortened and my feet lifted quickly without thinking about it.
Jim
I occasionally think about peeling my feet of the ground (weirdly, if I'm landing too heavily this seems to make me more light footed). As my feet leave the ground heel to toe in a continous movement I could see concentrating on lifting would break that flow.
Why are barefoot runners so much more given to these conceptual blunders?
Well Willie, besides being a casual barefooter for some 30 years, I ran barefoot 20 years ago for a few years, just once a week or so, no problem. I ran shod 10 years ago for a couple of years, also no problem. Now I've been running barefoot for about a year and a half, almost two years except the first six months were very sporadic. Again, no form issues that I know of. So it's hard for me to understand what all the fuss is about, but perhaps I'm just lucky. I don't mean to pooh-pooh the experience of others, but so many of these concepts just make no sense to me, although I'll readily admit they seem to work as coaching cues for many runners. The danger is that, because these cues are often based on faulty understandings of biomechanics (and yes, my understanding of running biomechanics is very new and partial at best--you're right about that), they may do just as much harm as good for some runners, as was the case for Jim. I don't know what the solution is, as many have reported benefits from this stuff, so I keep registering my dissenting voice just in case there's someone out there who's new to this and falls more into Barefoot Gentile 'just run' type of runner, and is therefore someone who needs to hear that some of us do just fine, for whatever reason, without consciously manipulating every aspect of running form.how long have you actually been involved in this, Lee? There was a LOT of pioneering going on for years, people experimenting, exchanging info, learning ... You just popped up at a time when a lot of the leg work had already been done for you.
That's exactly what I'm talking about.Today, we have a wealth of people doing legitimate biomechanical research on what we would call "natural" running gait. That research is suggesting we were right some of the time and wrong some of the time. As a teacher of this stuff, it's important to get it as right as possible based on what we have. In the case of "lifting the foot", it's becoming increasingly clear we were wrong.
Back in the day, I think most of us looked to solutions like "lifting your feet" because the predominant biomechanical information we found dealt with "jogging" gait or was one of the branded methods (Pose, Chi, Evolution, etc.). We could use some stuff from the latter, but we still had to blaze new ground.
What would be some other good teaching cues to minimize pushing off?