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Comment by hossbeast | Hacker News Reader

What did you do to fix your running posture? Any recommendations? (Trying to work on this myself)

Not OP, but I am a nationally qualified running coach (in my spare time outside of my day job). I have run all sorts of distances from 5k park runs to 100 mile and above ultra marathons. I have made every mistake in the book and helped quite a few people avoid the same mistakes.

To keep things simple with two easy to follow steps:

1. Tall posture, imagine a balloon is tied to the top of your head and is pulling you upwards.

2. Download a metronome app to your phone and set it around 170 and in time climb up to 175 180 if it feels ok. You then want to time each foot strike to a beep. This will cause your stride to narrow and discourage an overstride. When you overstride the foot extends forwards and the force of landing gets absorbed by your knee / hips, which is inefficient (its almost like applying a break) and it can cause injury. Running at a high cadence tends to make you ligter on your feet and encourages a good foot strike (under the cartridge of the hips), landing in this way benefits from the elasticity we have in our tendons and you get a certain amount of energy return from this.

This video describes it very well and the runner has beautiful form. Just don't try to take it all in, focus on the cadence 170-175-180 rhythm and get that right first

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSIDRHUWlVo

Be careful when changing running style. If you change too fast you increase the risk of injury. Happened to me. Had knee problems. Switched to barefoot running with short fast step and very light to no heel impact. Felt great! But I pushed too fast, got a foot injury which is still bothering me and limiting my long distance running.

For me a fast very short step on varied ground worked best to slow down.

https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-0gXKdNPW-2U/V4EW8HkpSfI/AAAAAAAAi...

I noticed that running barefoot naturally tends to correct overstriding. Because landing on your heels would be painful.

Awesome, thank you.

I did some Pose Method. Just enough to level up and prevent injury.

I’m not a runner. Don’t know what the running community recommends.

https://posemethod.com/running/

Is the 'pose method' just pseudoscience?

There isn't a single mention of it on Wikipedia, and as far as I can tell few serious runners use it.

I’m not sure what you mean by pseudo science here.

It’s a structured way to change your running style. The guy also has some opinions.

I did not do the actual Pose seminars (we did try though). Our coach did and was passing things on. We often looked at top runners to see what they were doing and tried to learn what we could.

If you want proof that this is the best way for everyone. Well, this is the fitness industry. You’re not going to get that! Listen to what they have to say if you think it could be useful for you. Give things a good try. If they work, keep them. If they don’t, discard them.

All I can say is that this method seems reasonable and now I can run on my bum knee with no problems.

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