Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

I will be hon­est. I am not a fan of long dis­tance run­ning. The most I could tol­er­ate was run­ning a half-marathon (back in 2008), and even that made me wanna go to sleep. The train­ing was so monot­o­nous and bor­ing, with most of the focus on log­ging enough miles. Since then, my knowl­edge of fit­ness, includ­ing endurance train­ing, has grown leaps and bounds. If I were to train for a marathon today, my train­ing hours would be halved and I would see a sig­nif­i­cant improve­ment in per­for­mance as well. But more on that later. This post is about being a more effi­cient runner.

Bare­foot Craziness

When I run, I run bare­foot. This makes me more effi­cient than a ver­sion of me that wears shoes. I attribute my lack of injuries, bet­ter recov­ery, less tired­ness to run­ning bare­foot. If you are a seri­ous run­ner, look into it. It was one of the smartest things I did. Run­ning shoes have a lot of spiel about “cor­rect­ing prona­tion” and stuff like that. But that’s how you run nat­u­rally and shoes by cor­rect­ing your stride often end up caus­ing a lot of injuries. Shin splints, for exam­ple, are one of the most com­mon ones. But a more generic issue that shoes cause is not giv­ing you feed­back when you are run­ning poorly. All the padding, espe­cially in the heels (why do you need so much heel padding if heel strik­ing is taboo?), doesn’t tell you “Hey idiot! You keep land­ing on your heels”. Instead, this pain man­i­fests in knee pain, shin splints etc. If you run bare­foot and land on your heels, you know imme­di­ately. And you have no option but to run in a more effi­cient man­ner. But as I keep repeat­ing, what worked for me need not work for you. Enough about me and enough about bare­foot running.

Improv­ing efficiency

I came across this video which packed a whole lot of infor­ma­tion in 15 min­utes. If you are a seri­ous run­ner, take a look. Or if you are like me and zone out while watch­ing videos, read the rest of this entry.

• Con­ven­tional wis­dom says that East African run­ners are bet­ter because they are genet­i­cally pre­dis­posed to run bet­ter, run to school while they are kids, train at high alti­tudes. This video sug­gests that the truth is a lot sim­pler — they just run more effi­ciently.
• A marathoner takes 1000 strides per mile, or 26200 strides total. So, cor­rect­ing an issue is going to go a long way. Or on the con­trary, one small inef­fi­ciency is going to be mul­ti­plied with a huge fac­tor — 26,200 to be exact.
• Bounce, Stride angle, Over-stride angle, Toe lift angle, Upper body torque, and Crossover angle — these are the 6 aspects that they get into.
• Bounce: The ver­ti­cal dis­tance you move, as your head bobs up and down while run­ning. The run­ner shown in the image below is Ryan Hall, who was the first Amer­i­can to run a half-marathon under the 60 minute mark. So, this guy is not a ran­dom noob. He has a bounce of 4″, which mul­ti­plied by 26,200 strides is a whop­ping 2.6 kilo­me­tres! And when you bounce up, you have to bounce back down = 5+ ver­ti­cal kms! So, not only are you doing a lot of extra work because of the bounce but the pres­sure you are putting on your body is a lot — as you are land­ing heavy all the time. This up and down motion is one of the pri­mary causes of fatigue. So, reduc­ing bounce will go a long way in improv­ing your run­ning and stride efficiency!
• Stride Angle: The max­i­mum open­ing between the front and trail­ing leg. Every degree increase here leads to a 2% increase in stride length. Stride angle is a func­tion of your hip flex­i­bil­ity.  A poor stride angle leads to over-extension.
  

  Note the figure-4 that both of them make!

• Over­stride: This is basi­cally reach­ing out far in front. This is prob­a­bly the biggest cause for knee pain and shin splints. You are reach­ing out, and land­ing ahead of your­self. Thus, your body puts pres­sure at an awk­ward angle on the knee and shins. Over­stride also inevitably will lead to a heel-strike. It is imper­a­tive that you land under your body, and not in front. This is a com­mon prin­ci­ple when you work with weights as well — when squatting/lifting, you always want the bar to in the same plane as your mid­line, or at least as much as pos­si­ble. The goal in an over­stride angle is to keep it as neg­a­tive as pos­si­ble. And the way to fix this is to increase stride angle.
  

  over­stride = heel strike

• Toe lift: This is the biggest cause of shin splints. You can see the toe-lift in the pre­vi­ous image as well, that’s an angle of 23 degrees. In com­par­i­son, how does a 0 degree look?
• Upper body torque & Crossover angle: My knowl­edge of upper body focus in run­ning was not to swing your arms across. This expands on that a bit. Twist­ing and torquing the upper body causes over-pronation in your legs and kees, as it is a com­pen­satory action. Get­ting the crossover angle as close to 0 degrees is important.
• The video fin­ishes off with some magic, where by improv­ing flex­i­bil­ity, the stride angle etc is vastly improved within an hour or so. But hey, these guys made a really great video and they are obvi­ously wel­come to sell­ing what they do.

An ultra-marathoner I used to run with once remarked that I had really good run­ning mechan­ics for a recre­ational run­ner. And we got talk­ing and in my case, it is a direct con­se­quence of bare­foot run­ning. I have a poor thresh­old for pain, espe­cially when it involves run­ning, and once I min­i­mized it — I auto­mat­i­cally became a bet­ter run­ner. And now, I can see how I can take it fur­ther — coz I do a lot of run­ning while play­ing Ulti­mate Fris­bee. Quite hon­estly, I’ve been lax about work­ing on my run­ning but that’s been part-laziness and part-necessity, as I am try­ing to put on some mass. Once that’s done, I am going to start by get­ting back to prac­tic­ing pose run­ning — to bet­ter my run­ning style and mus­cle use/distribution while run­ning.  Hill sprints, to work on speed. And flex­i­bil­ity, to work on the issues high­lighted in this post. This post shows that a lot of these issues are inter­con­nected, and if you get to the under­ly­ing issue and fix it, the improve­ment in results will be mag­ni­fied sev­eral times.

And if you are seri­ous about run­ning — take some time off. Work on these issues. One big prob­lem I have with run­ning is the train­ing involved — it is just too much time, and stress — miles upon miles upon miles of it. I think there are more effi­cient ways for that as well. But by work­ing on being more effi­cient, you will become a bet­ter run­ner, and add a few more years to your legs. I hope this post has given you guys some food for thought.

Next Up

This post got way longer than I intended. I wanted to get into pose run­ning, and some drills but will save that for another post. Endurance train­ing is another post I have in mind. Run­ners — video tap­ing your­self along with your run­ning bud­dies and ana­lyz­ing the video might lead you to some awe­some insights. And work on your flex­i­bil­ity and mobil­ity. Have fun running!