Culture of running form

I am going through the online course by Pose Method to become a certified running coach. It is an interesting course that covers a lot of theories including Newtonian physics (glad I did physics well back at high school!), as well as videos of practical sessions. At one of the videos, Dr Nicholas Romanov talks about running culture which I found really interesting and I am going to talk about it from my own perspective.

Imagine you are invited somewhere for lunch but at lunch time everyone grabs a pot full of food and sits at a corner to gobble the food up. Do you see anything wrong at this scene? Let me ask you some questions before you answer:

• Do not they get enough nutrients into their body?
• Do not they save time by avoiding the chit chat at the table?!
• Do not they have the freedom of eating it the way they want?!

It is obvious why this scene looks odd and out of norm because we all follow similar “dining culture“.

Now another scenario, you are going to play soccer with some new friends that you have not played before. You are about to choose your team members and you see this guy at the following scene, would you want him in your team? no? why?

The reason is, we have some images of good soccer players in our head and this guy does not fall near any of them. That means you are into the culture of right soccer moves and this one is out of the norm.

Now, look at this one taken from B-Line busses that go from Northern Beaches to the city and back. Is there something wrong with the drawings in blue?

Do you see it? let’s take a closer look:

See how the running girl is over-striding? do you see her back leg is trailing behind? see her foot is not moving towards her hips? or the toes pointing downwards right after leaving the ground indicating push-off?

If you do not see any of these, that means you have not honed your eyes to spot these running deviations. The other interpretation of it is:

We do not have a running form culture in our society yet

We do not pick such issues when we see these images. They are ubiquitous but we do not catch them. We are like the members of that family who eat their lunch in a pot at an isolated corner, so we do not see any problem with the way we eat.

Just go to any image stock site and search for running. On the bright side, such images help me hone my eyes better for spotting running issues ;) take a look of some samples here.