“Form follows function’. Since first hearing this phrase back in 2012, I must have encountered it a few hundred times in books, publications, videos and general discussion related to the topic of running technique, running form and how to avoid injury. Over-used phrases tend to lose value in the repetition but as I sat…
In part 1 and 2 of this series we looked at two phases of the running stride – initial contact and mid-stance – and their influence on Achilles injury for our Case Study – GAA footballer Myles Conway. Today we will be looking at a part of the running stride called ‘terminal stance’ consisting of…
Yesterday’s article began taking a look at a running analysis on Myles Conway, a GAA footballer and Achilles pain sufferer. We looked at the part of the running stride commonly called ‘Initial Contact’. Today we will progress to talk about ‘Mid Stance’. This position occurs shortly after ‘Initial Contact’ and stops when the full weight…
Myles Conway is a former Wicklow County footballer and he kindly allowed me to share his story so far and the results of our first biomechanical assessment a few weeks back. Myles related a familiar story to me of having tried pretty much every intervention and therapy under the sun from the mainstream to the…
Today I’d like to divert a bit from the long-standing discussion on whether it’s useful or not to assess someone’s running technique and instead look at why it can be so difficult and why consistent results from analysing running can be hard to come by. Let’s take a minute to refamiliarise ourselves with the key terms: Technique:…
In our last article we looked at the effect of bodyweight on running performance. We mentioned in fleeting the rather bland term ‘unit cost’ as part of this discussion. ‘Unit cost’ describes the amount of energy you spend per kilogram of your bodyweight to cover the distance of 1 kilometre. For a long time, experts…
We love our jobs as running technique specialists, we know what the ideal characteristics of a runner with good technique looks like…but the real skill is moulding the runners we work with into that ideal. Coaching Cues We achieve this through coaching cues. Each cue has it’s own individual and personal meaning to the student.…
Shouldn’t running just be about going out the door and putting one foot in front of the other? There is an old saying in soccer that it is ‘a simple game, complicated by idiots’? Have we done the same to running? As the science around running has expanded and the commercial interests in the sport with…
As a technical coach it is tempting to blame resistance to the idea of ‘technical’ training as opposed to ‘just running’ on inherent laziness in runners. I could bemoan that runners just want to ‘run, run, run and think of nothing else’. Superficially this seems to be true for many runners – they just want…
Jason and Rene appeared on RTE’s Ray Darcy Show and Matt Cooper’s ‘The Last Word’ last week to join in on the debate about running surfaces, injury and running technique. If you missed the interviews, listen back below and don’t forget to read our detailed response to Ger Hartmann’s article in ‘Roads are not to…
This article was written as a response to the radio interview ‘Road-Running will leave joggers on the scrap-heap’ with Ger Hartmann. We will discuss our view here on TodayFM tonight at 18:30 GMT. You’re driving along, inattentive, shortly after acquiring your driver’s license. As you look up from your mobile,…
Experience what a difference a day makes at the ‘Masters of Running’ workshops. Working with all levels of people who want to learn how to run with great technique, ranging from the chronically injured who were told to quit the sport they love, to beginners and elites. What a difference a day…
Berlin, Olympic Stadium, May 2064 The two men sat reclined against the plush comfy seats in the 160000 seater “Merkel Arena”, named after the great German stateswoman who united the squabbling dysfunctional states of the then European Union into the Federal States of Europe. Despite this, the federal states still kept much of their old…
What would Arthur Lydiard, the maker of champions, have thought of all these fads coming out? Naturalmovement, barefoot, natural movement drills? Surely, a master coach who turned New Zealand into the “Kenya of its day”, a serious practitioner of his craft, would have no time for such ideas when there was “serious” athletics training to…
