Let’s quickly go over the basic training philosophy that is more broadly discussed in the earliest runwithpower posts. Our bodies can be compared to a building. You need a specific set of plans to follow in order to build a solid, functional building. The design of the building, or the blueprints, show us the building’s basic structural components. Well, our bodies are extremely complex in terms of the muscles, nerves, and bones that it is made of. Yet, every human has the exact same basic design or layout. Our muscles and bones form the structure of our bodies. Bones themselves are totally dependent on the proper function of muscles to maintain their alignment in the body as well as their articulation, or movement, in joints.

With that being said, it literally takes every muscle in our body doing its job in order for the body to be like the building that is built to the exact specifications of its basic blueprint. The cool thing about the body is, when it is in this state, which we know as the “anatomically correct position,” the body is able to do all the things we do, like crawl, run, jump, lunge, dash, climb, and tumble, without sustaining injury! This is Law #4 as described in our training philosophy.

So then, where do injuries come from? It comes down to our muscles and how they have the ability to change all the time, based on what they are asked to do. If you make a muscle contract or stretch, it will become better at those tasks. These are examples of stimulus. If you are not giving a muscle stimulus on a consistent enough basis though, it will become weaker, tighter, and lose its functional ability. These are Laws #1 and #2. Now, if a muscle loses its functional ability, then the position of the bones or joints it is attached to will be moved out of alignment. Other muscles will have to take over, or “compensate” for the weaker, underused muscle. You can also overtrain a specific muscle or group of muscles, in which case the bones attached to them are pulled out of their natural alignment.

The problem is, when the skeletal system gets these various misalignments, the result is a much less durable frame with which to move. Suddenly, joints begin moving and rubbing in ways they aren’t naturally designed to, and muscles are forced to move in ways they shouldn’t. The skeletal system’s ability to evenly distribute the force of pressure and impact of running in the most efficient manner is compromised. Trainers and coaches will talk about having good posture when you run, not only to increase performance, but to reduce injury. How can you you really achieve good posture if your body does not have the muscular capacity to hold the joints in their correct positions? Yes, you can think about proper body alignment all you like, but true posture is not achieved by thinking about it. It is simply the way your muscles hold your skeleton without your conscious control.

So how is it that we lose the functionality of our muscular system? It predominately comes with the fact that ever since we were little kids, we have spent most of our lives sitting, allowing our muscles to get a whole lot better at sitting and not as good at moving. The number of hours we sit every day adds up to a whole lot of muscular dysfunction around the hip joint, which is the foundation of the body! Humans were made to move, yet all we tend to do these days is sit around. Even when we go to the gym, how common is it to sit at a machine to work out? All this inactivity and lack of proper stimulus will result in a great deal of deviation from the optimal, original design of the body. The end result is, over the miles and miles of running we put in on these misaligned bodies, they wear and tear and eventually break down. Either a chronic pain begins to emerge in an over-stressed ligament or joint, or a sudden, powerful movement pushes our muscles to the point of tearing.

The next post on this subject contains the good news! You can get rid of these injuries altogether by properly training your muscular system!

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There are two theories behind strength training and running. The first is that you are a runner who also wants to look a certain way so you lift weights to help build muscle in your arms and chest  and back or wherever else you want to add muscle size and definition. The second is that you are a more serious runner and you wold like to train in such a way that improves your upper bodies abilities when it comes to making you a better runner.

These exercises are actually built for both theories. Contrary to popular belief you CAN and will firm up, define, and add power to the muscles of the upper body without using weights at all. Most runners simply buy into the mentality that lifting weights brings.

When you think about running and the role of the upper body this can really help determine the type of training you should do to help maximize your ability to run with power. Your stride begins and ends in your hips. The initiation of the linear motion begins in the muscles that constitute the hip flexors and proceeds to create a chain reaction down the legs and up through the torso. Your arms are simply a byproduct of the muscle patterns that are created in your hips.

Runners who have an efficient stride in their lower body almost always have great arm mechanics. Runners who have poor efficiency in their hips almost always have poor arm mechanics as well. Just watch the next time you are around a group of younger sprinters. The kids who have been blessed with a nice stride all have great arm mechanics, those without great strides have arms that are all over the place.

Most running coaches and trainers look at the arm mechanics and try to fix the issues with various arm drills and special equipment that forces your arms to try and manufacture good arm mechanics. Our approach is a little different. These drills and techniques can be helpful but unless you correct the stride, you can do all the arm work you want, you still have an inefficient runner. Remember the key is not to force the body to have proper arm mechanics but instead give it the necessary stimulus to develop natural arm mechanics on its own.

I realize most trainers will say that the fancy equipment is the only way to improve arm mechanics but that is just the limitation of the trainer. As you improve your overall stride, your arm mechanics will also improve. Once you reach a high level of efficiency, then the time to help enhance your already great arm mechanics makes some of these tools a little more valuable.

Scott Olson

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Wherever you look for training to become a better and faster runner, you will always hear about proper running form. Why is form so important? First off I would like to say that at runwithpower we do not argue the fact that proper running form certainly will improve your running. We differ from most trainers and coaches as to exactly what proper running “form” is. Let me demonstrate this in as few words as possible (a series of books could literally be published on this topic). Most running and speed coaches will try to “teach” athletes what to do with their arms, their knees, their posture, their ankles, so on and so forth, in order to achieve what we would say is the most efficient running stride possible. It’s not hard to recognize when some has improper running form. You literally can see it in the fact that when you watch any group of people running side by side, they all look different.

If there is such thing as the “most efficient stride” then it will look just about the same in every person, doesn’t matter if they are tall, short, or whatever. If you have been reading about our training philosophy up to this point, maybe you have begun to pick up on our reasoning that when we talk about the correct anatomical position on the structural joints and full range of motion due to an efficient muscular system, when training according to the 4 Laws we have described, all this translates to correct running form.

So in effect, we don’t necessarily believe that you can teach someone proper running form, especially if their muscular system has inefficiencies that affect how their skeletal system is positioned and literally moves. You have to train the body according to the 4 Laws of training we have described in order to allow the body to naturally begin to run with better, more efficient form.

An analogy we use frequently is comparing the body to a car. Think of the alignment of a car’s wheels and how the performance of a car might be affected if the wheels were slightly, or drastically, off. A sprinter could be compared to a high performance race car. A long distance runner might be comparable to any car driving thousands of miles. The point is, in the race car analogy, a serious accident could occur if the wheels weren’t aligned properly, or the engine might have to work significantly harder to accelerate a car with poorly aligned wheels. In the analogy of a long drive, they will wear out quickly if they are off, as well as you will get less gas milage over the course of a long trip, say if the tires were flat. The flat, misaligned wheels of a car can easily be compared to skeletal misalignments in our bodies that negatively affect our overall performance.

So our idea of running with proper form is similar to driving a finely tuned car. The difference is you can’t teach a car to realign its wheels. Adjustments have to be made to the actual car itself, just as we have to literally train our muscular system to reposition our joints in a manner that promotes more efficient movement. You can’t just teach someone to run with a more efficient stride. It must be a byproduct of efficient training.

Loren Sheets

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The final Law is the one that is actually the result of doing the previous 3 correctly. We believe that our bodies are designed to be in the anatomically correct position at all times. What we mean by this is that your skeletal system should always be in perfect alignment. If you have ever seen pictures in an anatomy book like this one and seen the skeletal system then you know it is designed to look a certain way. We try to simplify this and focus on what we consider to be your 4 main structural joints, your shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles. Each of these joints are designed to be vertically stacked on top of one another and directly across from one another on a horizontal plane as you can see in the picture.

This is what is considered the anatomically correct position and is the way our bodies are intended to be. However, here is the catch. For us to be in this position means that our muscular system is working perfectly. There can be no imbalances in strength, size, or range of motion or the muscles will pull the skeleton out of its natural alignment. The skeleton is completely dependent on the muscles both for movement and positioning.

For example, your iliopsoas (hip Flexors) are a pair muscles that originates in the hip and lumbar spine and then inserts down on your femur. These muscles are responsible for the flexion of the hip (lifting of your knee when running) and are just one of several very important muscle groups when it comes to running. Since we have used this example in the other laws lets again talk about sitting. If you spend a significant amount of time on a consistent basis in a seated position, your hip flexor muscles will become increasingly tight.

What this actually means is that the muscles can “shorten” as the fibers become less pliable from their lack of being elongated with proper stretching and efficiency training. This in turn will literally begin to pull your pelvis forward or into an anterior tilt. One of the many negative side effects of this will be increased tension in your lumbar spine. The point in all of this is that if you are not doing the appropriate amount of stimulus to all of the muscles in the body, it will be impossible for your body to hold the anatomically correct position.

So all 4 laws work together to form the Runwithpower training system. In the nearly two decades I have been training I have realized that the perfect training system already existed, we were just not following it. By us understanding that our bodies are designed to receive stimulus, that the greater amount of stimulus we give it will create higher levels of change, that we should receive stimulus in a progressive manner, and that everything we do should be to help our bodies maintain the anatomically correct position, we can give you the best possible running programs.

We will do more posts later and in greater depth on the 4 laws but we hope that for now you all have a good idea of what forms the backbone of our training philosophy.

Scott Olson

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What if we told you there was one training system that would work perfectly for every single human on the planet and has been working correctly since the dawn of mankind? If we made a sweet infomercial and offered it in 3 easy installments of just 29.95 would you buy it? The fitness industry has been one fad after the next for the better part of 30 years now. There is a training system that has worked without fail (with the exception of certain birth defects) though since the beginning of our existence. At Runwithpower we call it God’s strength progression but really it can be Nature’s strength progression or whatever you want to believe created man. 

When we are born our bodies come with Law #1 (that we respond to stimulus) and Law #2 (the greater amount of a stimulus, the more change there will be) built into our bodies. Now the best part about this training system is it came with its own built in progression. We call this Law #3, “The body was designed to recieve stimulus in a progressive manner.”

When a baby if first born, all it really has the ability to do is lay on its back. In this position, there is not too much demand being placed on the muscular system. As the baby begins to instinctively move its arms and legs, eventually it gains the ability to roll over onto its stomach. In this prone position, pressure is now being loaded into the babies shoulders and arms, and begins providing more stimulus to its core muscles as it attempts to reach for objects and push itself up onto all fours. Eventually, it gains the muscular efficiency to get up on its hands and knees. From there, the baby begins to crawl, which provides stimulus to the hip, the shoulders, arms, back, and core in a fully integrated movement. As the body learns balance and coordination, its muscular system is gaining strength and efficiency, enough to the point that it can stand up on its own and start walking, running, jumping, and so forth.

By going through this progression, the body achieves its highest level of muscular efficiency, meaning the best posture, greatest range of motion in the joints, greatest resilience to injury, and greatest potential for power development. We believe that most people’s efficiency is at their best when they are only 4 or 5 years old, before the begin to lose that efficiency due to an inactive lifestyle.

So the strength progression is the best model of how the body is meant to receive stimulus in a progressive manner to achieve its highest level of efficiency. Exercises are just different forms of stimulus. At Runwithpower, we categorize exercises based on how high the level of demand is on the muscular system. Take a barbell squat for example. This is a very common move because most trainers believe that it comes with many positives such as increased leg strength, improved posture, and strengthening the muscles that support the knees. However, the exercises we typically use with our athletes are based on the potential negative side effects that an exercise may have on their body. In order for these positives to be achieved, the athlete must already have a muscular system that is capable of accepting the level of demand the exercise required. In the case of the squat, any athlete who has tightness in their hamstrings, hip flexors, calves, back, lack of full flexion and extension in their pelvis, inability to load bear equally into both sides of the hip, and so on, will ultimately be building higher levels on inefficiency as the body tries to manufacture a way to perform the exercise within its current limitations.

The best way to train then would be to start at a lower level of the strength progression, giving the body  chance to develop greater muscular efficiency. We will be giving you many tips and hints on how to have multiple levels of demand for the many different running drills and exercises you can do. Learning what level your body needs to be training at is the key to maximizing your results.

Scott Olson

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Following Law #1, the second law refers to the amount of stimulus you give to your body. So Law #2 says the following, “The greater the amount of stimulus you receive, the greater the amount of anatomical change will occur”. This can be both a positive and a negative. For example, if you spend a tremendous amount of time in a seated position like we mentioned in the previous post, your muscles will become tight and the body will literally conform itself to the seated position. Now imagine staying in this seated position for 24 hours straight. Good luck getting out of that chair. That is a great example of how Law #2 can affect us in a negative way. I have very fair skin so if I spend hours out in the sun without spf 450 on I typically pay the price with a fun little sunburn that hurts for days.

How does Law #2 affect us in a positive way is really dependent upon what you do. If you eat a healthy diet, you will be able to control your weight, have greater amounts of energy, and have a healthier lifestyle overall. If you consistently warm-up prior to exercise your muscular system will always do a better job of performing the demands you are about to place on it. If you consistently do a cool-down following your workouts you will help to eliminate the potential negative side effects of your workout and allow the body the chance to remain in the anatomically correct position which will help to eliminate soreness and hold over fatigue.

I could literally type for days on all the examples of how Law #2 impacts our lives. The key to remember is that you need to be aware of how much of anything you are doing and decide if this is the desired effect you want to have happen. If you constantly lift weights for your chest and biceps but only do about 1/3 of that amount for the other muscles of the upper body you have to understand that this will come with some negative ramifications. Too much demand to the muscles of the chest and not enough to the other directions of the body will cause you to pull your shoulders forward and out of alignment. The negative side effects to this are numerous, especially for an athlete.

Your body was designed to respond to stimulus. This was Law #1. Law #2 is there for you to make a choice. You can either use Law #1 for your benefit or your demise. Runwithpower is going to teach you how to utilize training techniques in the appropriate manner to make sure you are not allowing your body to develop imbalances that could negatively impact your stride.

Scott Olson

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Law #1 - The first law is pretty simple, it identifies the fact that the human body is designed to respond to stimulus. Everything our body does is in response to stimulus. Specifically for what we are discussing in this blog lets keep this in regards to the muscular system. Our muscles are designed to be used. As a matter of fact when you do not use your muscles they eventually lose their ability to do the jobs they were designed for. The two primary jobs are of course movement and alignment of the skeletal system. An analogy we like to use is that of a cast. Imagine putting your lower leg in a cast and leaving it on for a few weeks. Anyone who has broken their leg can tell ou that when the cast is removed the muscles are smaller, weaker, and much less able to perform their intended functions.

This is an extreme example of not using our muscular system but what about when you have been sitting in the car on a long road trip for several hours, and then you stop as a gas station and step out of the car, think of how slowly you straighten out your legs and how tight your muscles have become. Now think of the number of hours you have been sitting like this your entire life. I would be willing to bet most of you are reading this while sitting in a chair. The point of this post is to get you to understand that everything is a form of stimulus, even if it is a lack of stimulus, and that the body has no choice but to react and change based on that stimulus. We have a saying at runwithpower, “Whatever you are currently doing is causing you to either get better or worse, there is no staying the same.”

The knowledge of this should change you entire outlook on training and physical performance. It is not just the heavy weights, repetitive drills or the intense activities that make us the athletes we are. It is the entire combination of all the reactions to stimulus that have been taking place over the course of your whole life that have made your body what it is today.

Scott Olson

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In a nutshell, the muscles around the hip joint become atrophied and imbalanced during the course of our lives due to the inactivity and lack of proper stimulus to those muscles. Muscles become weak, other muscles become tight, and strength imbalances between the muscles develop. Eventually, our body compensates by changing the angle of the pelvis to allow different muscles to take over for tight and underused muscles. The compromised position of the pelvis affects the angle of the spine above it and the femurs below it, which affects the position of the back and shoulders, as well as the knees and ankles. Ultimately, you can see that you get a very poorly aligned skeletal system. We begin to lose functional range of motion in our hip joint as its alignment is further compromised. In the end, our stride length is shortened because of the body’s incapacity to generate its maximum power, as hip alignment is compromised and full articulation of the hip joint becomes impossible.

The question that everything really has been boiling down to is simply this: How do you train for efficiency? We have developed a system of training that allows the body to become extremely efficient. It is based on several principles of the human body, and focuses on 4 Laws that we have developed that provide a framework for all of our training.

The next few posts will really unwrap more about how our bodies tend to lose their efficiency, and how our unique training system specifically combats these inefficiencies in our musculoskeletal system, leading to greater power, longer strides, and faster running.

Loren Sheets

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Most training out there is geared towards training for stride frequency. All of the cone drills, ladder drills, SAQ drills, etc. are designed to increase the rate of your stride frequency. The idea is that if you focus on those fast twitch muscle fibers, you can take quicker strides, and you will increase your speed. What about stride length? What kind of training helps to increase stride length? An even bigger question to ask is which one is more important to train for, stride frequency or stride length?

As a trainer, I must say that both are important in order for an athlete to reach their maximum potential speed. But, which has the greater impact on overall speed? To be quite honest, your stride frequency is greatly under the influence of your genetic predisposition. If you were not born with quick leg turnover rate, you will not be able to train to make it a whole lot faster. Yes, improvements can be made through specific training tools, but the biggest gains in your speed will occur in the realm of increasing the distance you cover in each stride, not in the rate of leg turnover.

Think of trying to run in sand. It’s not very easy, is it? Does the sand slow down your leg turnover rate? Maybe a little bit, but for the most part, your legs are still cycling through at a fairly decent rate. Where you lose the majority of your speed is in your stride length. Because the sand does not provide a durable surface for which to plant your foot, not as much force is returned back to your body from foot contact. Hence, your strides will be shorter than if you were running on a solid surface.

You can train your body to be able to run faster through increasing your stride length, by increasing the total efficiency of your body. The next post will address more of the components of training for a longer stride.

Loren Sheets

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Everyone has a certain potential for speed. It used to be believed that you were born with your natural gifts and that was it. Each individual was as fast as they were meant to be. Obviously, though, we have found that anyone can train to increase their overall speed. The secret to becoming faster and reaching your full potential for speed is to understand that no matter what you are doing, you body is reacting and changing based on that stimulus, so the goal is to find out how to give it the stimulus it needs to cause it to change and become faster.

The idea of it seems quite simple, and thats because it really is. Speed is simply a high level of efficiency and power throughout your entire muscular system. When your muscular system is operating extremely efficiently, and is trained for power, you will inevitably become a faster athlete. An efficiency muscular system means that it can do its two main jobs of holding the skeletal system, the bones and joints, in their anatomically correct position, and the ability to then move those joints through their full range of motion. Training to achieve this is not a simple process, however. There are a ton of speed training programs out there. Each one is based on physiological principles that pertain specifically to your muscles and how they operate on a cellular and neurological level. Most programs incorporate different aspects of quick twitch muscle fiber training to develop those muscles and make you run faster. The way these programs go about it is sometimes quite different. Some programs may do different speed drills that focus on different muscles in the running stride, others use different techniques such as isometric training and over-speed training to develop specific fibers, the II-B quick twitch fibers that produce most of the muscular force for sprinting.

At runwithpower, we we realize that speed-specific programs do not provide each athlete with a complete training system that ensures a high level of efficiency in their muscular system. Most programs only focus on the muscles on a cellular or neurological level. They typically do not think of the muscular system in terms of the entire body. If they say they do, their styles of training do not reflect it. The difference between the mainstream training world and us is that our focus is on the body, whereas most other programs focus on the specific exercises. I can’t count the number of times I have heard the phrase, “This is the single most effective exercise for developing…” Really? It is the single best exercise? Did they even take into account that maybe if they take an athlete through a program that extensively uses this one stimulus, it may, depending on that athletes individual muscular imbalances and compensations, have some significant negative impacts on their performance. No two athletes have the same body, and certainly none have a perfect body. THerefore, each athlete has the potential to react differently as well as negatively to any stimulus. This means that there really can be no perfect exercise. What would happen is an athlete did not have full articulation of the hip joint and was asked to perform heavy squats? There would be a huge potential for negative muscular compensation, as the hip would not be able to accept load through its full range of motion. Other parts of the body, such as the knees and lower back, would have to compensate for this lack of mobility in the hip, leading to imbalances that would further diminish the athletes overall efficiency. The obvious strength benefits of the squat are now defeated by the compensated muscular patterns that develop. Each exercise has things that are good, as well as things that negatively affect performance. If there is one thing you get from reading this post, it would be this: begin to think in terms of the body, not the exercise or drill. The goal of training should not be to come up with the “best exercises” but rather to understand which exercises should be used and when they should be used, depending on the specific body and its current lack of efficiency. 

This is just the beginning of a much bigger speed training philosophy that runwithpower would like to share with you. Hopefully you will continue to stay updated and will take something valuable each time that will impact your athleticism in a positive way.

If you haven’t yet checked out the posts on the 4 Laws of Training, follow this like here to learn more about these laws in regards to how the body is designed to react to stimulus and how this stimulus impacts our performance.

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