how fast could I actually get if I optimized my running form when I started running I began dealing with injuries the two biggest ones were in my knees and in my hip at first I thought it might be overtraining after speaking to my trainer at the time I realized it might be my running form and if I was ever going to run fast and injury-free there were three distinct things I needed to fix within one year after making these changes I went from running an 18-minute 5K with pain to a 15-minute 5 K without pain at my Peak I was running 150 km per week without any pain whatsoever so in this video I'm going to show you the three key things I changed and teach you two ways you can assess your own running form so that you can start to run fast and injuryf free as well there are two ways to assess your running form and today I'm going to show you both the first one requires a camera and a treadmill and the second one you can do from the comfort of your own home so let's get inside and film my run when you're filming your run you want to get a side view a front view and a view from the back you also want to film at the highest frame rate possible it's easiest to do on a treadmill but if you got a friend who can film you while running outside it's even better because some people tend to adjust their run form just a little bit when on a treadmill compared to an outside run after you have filmed your run it's time to PLU your camera into your computer to see what's going on so the first thing I want to take a look at is my stri the point of contact of my front foot I'll just take a freeze frame and transport it into Photoshop you can use any software you like but I just like to use Photoshop for measuring angles now I want to take a look at three angles from the side view my hip to knee angle my knee to ankle angle and the angle of my foot compared to my lower leg the best biomechanical way to run is to land underneath the center of gravity here if you're a distance Runner you want your foot to relax when it's in the air just until it hits the the ground here where it needs to tighten so in the beginning I had what's called an overstride let me just show you here H which means that I landed my foot in front of my body and I needed to find ways to land closer to the center of gravity now for me the way to do that was to increase my strides per minute at the same pace so instead of running 160 strides per minute at a 5 minute per kilm Pace I would run about 175 to 180 strides per minute at the same pace when I did that I would start to shorten my stride in front of my body which meant that I would land better and by better I mean biomechanically better I also had problems with my hip extension and activating my glutes when running and since your glutes are the biggest muscle in your body you want to activate those when you're running so I started doing muscle activation exercises before every run I would mostly do glute Bridges and lunges with a focus on glute activation now let's take a look at the frontal view we want to take a look at the hip here you see you want to make sure you don't have any deficiencies that align with your run form the most common ones are weak hip abduction and hip flexion and the reason for my knee and hip pain was an over flexion at the knee and a weak hip abduction to fix this I started doing specific exercises like run jumps and clams and lying hip abductions lastly we want to take a look at how our feet hit the ground here I'm looking to see if my foot hits the ground like your feet design we want to avoid a heel strike and land midfoot and then roll from the outside of the feet towards the big toe and then take off I have actually taken a running form test on a force platform as well so I can show you how my feet are hitting the ground exactly like this don't think too much about the butterfly here that's because it also measures when I'm in the air but this is how I hit the ground so you see from the outside and then towards the big toe you know what there's an easy way to see exactly how you hit the ground without needing a force platform let me show you now this will only work if you actually run in your running shoes but if you take a look at the bottom here you will see where they have actually been most worn so you can see on my shoe it's around here you can see this is where I land I don't have a bunch of a worn out shoe here it's more new but down here you can see it's worn out and if you look at the toes as well see right here is where I have my liftoff I also have some here so this way you can actually see how you're hitting the ground and you can also see if you have anything in the heel I don't have much because I don't feel strike anymore but there's another thing that's extremely fun when you look at this and that's to look right here because if you have a hole here at the big toe that means that you're lifting your big toe when you're running and well there's no point in doing that and most people actually get some shin splints by doing that because they are constantly lifting their foot when they are taking their feet off the ground here if you sort of lift your big toes and then you flex your foot it's called a dorsal flexion but if you do that with your feet as well then there just a lot of strides where you keep on activating the front of your foot so if you see that hole on the top of your shoe that means that you have to work on your motor control of your feet and your toes so that you can relax when they should be relaxed and you can uh sort of tighten and flex them when they should Flex it's also important to note that different shoes sort of cater to different running Styles so a shoe like this with a back heel it's very difficult to start running a for foot or midfoot if you're used to being a heel strike and then you got this big massive heel drop so if you want to practice if you really do a heel strike if you want to practice going more to the mid and front foot then you should get something with a bit lower of a heel drop that will force you to land more midfoot or front foot but besides changing my biodynamics doing some muscle activation and choosing the right type of shoes I did one more thing that made a huge difference that almost nobody does and I don't know why because it just makes you so much faster I started doing 5 minutes of technique drills before every run I focus on coordination and muscle activation but you should really focus on your deficits now let's go get [Music] it