Another runner to watch is Baylors 4th runner, 4×400 Olympic gold medalist Darold Williamson. Back when we were talking about the components of speed, stride frequency and stride length, we emphasized how we can make the biggest improvements to our speed by training to increase our stride length. Watch how long Williamson’s strides are compared to the runner several meters back. His leg turnover is not any faster than probably any of us, really, yet his tremendous speed is due to the fact that he can cover so much ground with each stride.

I hope you enjoy watching this as much as I did. Wariner is one of my all time favorite runners, he reminds me of the older generations of runners who were so fluid and powerful as opposed to the tight, muscle bound sprinters of the modern era.

Loren Sheets

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But what really is the cause of this tightness and fatigue? Is it simply a lack of endurance? Why can some people seem to just run without losing their form while others can go from a dead sprint to nearly collapsing in a matter of seconds? The question we all should be asking is how do we train our bodies to overcome this sudden loss of power and fluidity?

The sudden loss of form known as the wall can be attributed to a muscular compensation somewhere in our bodies. An efficient stride is dependent upon all the muscles of the body working together doing their job, but because of many forms of isolated muscle training and inactive lifestyles, our muscular systems develop compensations. Certain muscles learn to compensate and take over the jobs of other weaker and underused muscles.

The result is the overall efficiency of the entire muscular system becomes very low. The muscles that have to compensate fatigue very quickly due to inefficient movement of the skeletal system, and when this happens, such as near the end of a race or in the 4th quarter, your form falls apart and you “hit the wall.” Most athletes believe that they simply need to increase their endurance, but usually all they are doing is increasing the muscular endurance of the muscles that are already compensating for the rest of their weak, undertrained muscles. This is not a very effective strategy in comparison to getting rid of the muscular compensations altogether.

Our programs are built on the 4 Laws of Training. With these 4 Laws, you can train your body to become much more efficient, and get rid of any compensation that may exist in your body that is causing you to tighten up and lose your running form. You can never teach your body to relax and run with more fluidity, like most trainers and coaches try to do, when your muscular system itself is limited by its own compensations and weaknesses. By retraining your muscular system and getting rid of muscular compensations, your running stride will naturally increase in power and fluidity.

Loren Sheets

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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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Studies show a correlation between speed and ground contact time. As speed increases, the time the foot spends in contact with the ground decreases. The idea behind training a dorsiflexed ankle position is so that the ankle keeps the foot in the best position to make contact with the ground and quickly “rebound” resulting in less time of the foot in contact with the ground. A fast runner needs to be able to plant their foot in a dorsiflexed position so they can get it off the ground as quickly as possible as to not slow themselves down. Many “specialists” suggest that training your foot to spend less time on the ground is the best way to improve your overall speed.

The idea of dorsiflexion sounds good, and it is in fact one of the biggest training standards for running technique in the modern speed training world. But, there is a flaw in this logic. Again, we are not saying that dorsiflexion itself is a bad idea in that it is essential to an efficient runners stride. The flaw comes in how practically all training programs approach teaching dorsiflexion. It is true that there is a definite correlation between foot contact time and speed. But, one of the biggest misconceptions, not just here but in many fields of study is that correlation equals causality.

Just because less foot-ground contact time correlates with greater speed doesn’t mean that training the foot to pop quickly off the ground will equate to greater speed. Less time the foot spends on the ground is not the reason sprinters run faster, it is the effect of running faster. It is simply a byproduct of your body moving faster. The faster you run, the shorter your foot will be in contact with the ground. Correlation, but not causality. Greater speed is attained by a greater amount of force applied to the ground to propel your body forward. This power is primarily generated at the hip joint, not at the ankle. A dorsiflexed ankle helps to transfer this force into the ground and therefore is a component of speed, but if you do not focus on increasing power from the hip, then all the dorsiflexion in the world will only make you so much faster. It is true that ankle dorsiflexion at the point of ground contact is the most efficient position for transferring the power generated in your hip into the ground and back to your body, but you will still only be able to run as fast as your body will allow depending on the efficiency and power of your stride.

Dorsiflexion should be naturally occurring movement as a result of an efficient stride. Stride efficiency begins at the hip, not the foot. When you train your stride to be powerful and efficient originating from the hip, then as you pull your foot through by driving your knee forward, dorsiflexion will occur as a natural movement of the ankle as you bring your foot down to make contact with the ground. The focus of you training should not be to try and shorten the time your foot remains on the ground by forcing a dorsiflexed position. This should occur naturally as your build an efficient stride from the hips down causing your speed to increase.

The focus of training programs should be on increasing hip power and efficiency. In the future we will be building programs that you can purchase that take your body through a progression that follows the 4 laws of training we have described that will totally redesign your muscular system starting at the hips, following the strength progression, as to fill in any gaps in strength and efficiency. Your hip strength, range of motion, and overall power will increase as a result, giving you the necessary tools to run with the most powerful stride possible.

Loren Sheets

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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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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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This is when I started to realize that maybe it was not the athletes fault but rather that they had a muscular system that responded differently to the stimulus or training that the trainer was using. Perhaps it was not all about the drills but rather the specific needs of the body you were working with that should determine the drills and techniques you used. From there I met a trainer who used a great tool called body typing that enabled him to understand how different muscular systems might respond to various types of demands such as strength training and speed training. He categorized people based on various styles of muscular systems and this allowed him to give each individual the right type of training for their muscular systems to respond with maximum results.

I adopted a similar style of my own for understanding how people’s muscular systems would respond to the type of training we were doing. The other component that I felt many trainers struggled with was that they lacked a reliable system for training. There are some tremendous training systems out there. Velocity Sports uses some advanced training techniques that are able to provide some good results just to name one. However I feel all training systems miss the mark on what is the most important aspect of all. Your choices for exercises must be based solely on the body you are working with, not the exercises you feel are the “best” exercise for speed, or strength, or whatever else you are training for.

Through years of research and trial and error with an emphasis on error, I came up with 4 consistent laws regarding the human body that I feel are the cornerstone for our training system. I will cover each of these laws with you in upcoming posts in this category so you have an understanding of how we approach our training and how we feel it is the key to maximizing your results.

Scott Olson

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