quote:<HR>Originally posted by sport jester:

How wide your feet are in running (the railroad wear pattern I wrote about), the more energy you waste in torso rotation. You're not just pushing yourself forward, your pushing yourself in rotation around the center of your hips and thus more energy and motion you waste in counterbalance arm swing.
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Thank you for the detailed reply.

You must have the subjects do more than just run a narrow guage, no? Couldn't they hurt themselves by only changing that one aspect of their form?

What about injuries? Doesn't torso twisting travel down through the legs and exaggerate other problems as well? My own trainer had me change my arm swing to fix something along those lines.

I've seen mention in other threads of runners training on a narrow track or running on a line but I didn't understand why they would do something like that.

Ted,

You make some great points and I'll follow through with your questioning.

You're asking for studies that I can say that I haven't found either in terms of running guage measurements or torso rotation either. It's not studied, because we consider it a natural part of running. Few biomechanics even question why we swing our arms in the first place. I'm just one of those few. Only my answers are a little different.

Running guage is an animal measurement, not human. Why it's ignored is my question, but "experts" tend to walk away from me rather than discuss it. In fact, I'm sure you've never even considered the issue until you read my post.

I study biomimicry, biomimetics (google it), and I'm a biomimeticist; The biological mimicry of animals for human adaptation. It's the science behind studying birds for building airplanes, seed burrs for creating velcro, bone cells to build the Eiffel Tower, and Coleman to study spider webs in developing his patented Coleman tent. You can get an engineering degree in the field, but no school teaches the science in application to human athletics.

I'm just one of maybe 10 others in the world who study other animals as athletes to develop more efficient human performance.

Right now, I'm sponsored by Nike's Innovation Kitchen, their sports research lab. They're just as interested in the idea of gauge measurement because I'm the first one to bring it up with them.

The question I asked their director is quite simple. "Why do we swing our arms when we run anyway?" If it's true that we swing our arms in counterbalance, then what's so out of balance that need to swing our arms to counter it? You can't answer that question and neither could NIKE's top scientists either. Oh and as for the other shoe manufacturers, their research directors wouldn't discuss the question with me.

You can simply walk down the street and slowly spread your legs apart increasing your guage measurement. What you'll discover is that the wider your legs spread, the slower you walk and the greater torso rotation you have to generate with your arm swing. You'll eventually end up walking like a baby with your arms spread straight out.

If increasing your guage decreases your speed, then why wouldn't decreasing your gauge improve it? That's why I studied the cheetah, because the world's fastest runner has no gauge measurement, they run (and only the cheetah runs) one foot perfectly in front of the other. That was reason for me enought to figure out how they do it.

Wouldn't it be logical that a perfectly balanced runner shouldn't need to swing their arms because nothings out of balance to counter? My running technique I teach requires no arm swing at all and I demonstrated it for NIKE's lab scientists. It was from that point they've sponsored my work. The treadmill studies are for them.

And yes 6MPH isn't very fast. For consideration, these individuals are all personal trainers for 24 Hour Fitness health clubs who are in my test group (would you like to talk to them?). While they're not full runners, all of them are certified trainers and many have exercise related degrees, which is what NIKE needed to discuss my technique with them in greater detail.

Giving someone a 90 minute lesson to completely change the way they run will take time to develop comfort with. So the 6MPH is strictly a speed that they can run comfortably in both techniques for comparison. The data is my stepping stone to get to NIKE's top runners to teach them.

My long term running students have all gained 20% increases in peak speed and can maintain peak speed longer than using your running technique compared with mine.

We're naturally stonger on one side of our body than the other. If you admit that's true (called your dominant and non dominant side, or left and right handed for the lay person), then how does your body compensate for the strength differences? How can you tell if someone is right or left handed by the way they walk?

That was my question in studying animals that have no arm swing let alone no arms at all. Even four legged animals are dominant sided. How they compensate for that difference was my question. The faster four legged animals are much more efficient in running biomechanics, and their running guage is a primary factor.

I don't spend much time studying human athletes; instead I study other animals. In finding bipedal animal runners, you can find foundation to my writing in the Jan 31, 2002 issue of Nature Magazine. Go to your library and find it, or buy it online...

The article relates to documenting the biomechanics of a bipedal dinosaur called a theropod. At 163 million years old, its footprints are documented to alter in gait from a parallel running stance to a linear form as I teach.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/diapsids/saurischia/theropoda.html[/URL" target="_blank">

One of the reasons for studying this animal is that I consider survival the ultimate race. While humans think races in minutes, meters, or miles, mother nature measures her races in millions of years. The Theropod was predecessor to the tyranasourus rex who has been linked by DNA (google dinosaur+soft tissue for better articles than my claim) to our modern ostrich (hey, haven't you ever wondered why they're so aggressive?). I consider these animals to be the ultimate runners racing for survival today.

The Nature article data from GPS tracking shows the animal increasing it's stride length almost three fold by the physical change in running gait. I figured out how they do it and why they do it. The principle is called centerline thrust if you google it. It's used in airplane design for the same reasons it applies to athletes, no counterbalance forces are needed to control the craft if one engine fails.

Humans run with the same propulsion problems as airplanes fly with two engines. An engine on the wing will rotate the plane if its opposite fails. Humans run with side propulsion no different than the plane. Airplanes have to counter by steering the plane in the opposite direction to compensate, we use counterbalance arm swing for the same reason.

And if an airplane with different sized engines (like our body strength) requires centerline thrust to fly balanced, it applies to humans no different than it was used by dinosaurs millions of years ago.

As a 27 foot long animal with 6ft legs, this animal can't afford to waste energy in hip rotation because it would ripple through the rest of their bodies and they would waste energy in a wave form through their bodies as they ran. think of wiggling a garden hose. A theropod's hips would have the same wave effect if their hips rotated at the middle of their body.

To run, they need completely stationary biomechanics throughout their bodies. Since their arms were in fact very small, no counterbalance forces could be generated. Altering their running gait to centerline thrust was their solution. I simply teach humans to run the same way for the same reasons.

By running like this dinosaur integrates muscles in the legs (gluteus maximus and adductors which is where the speed increase comes from) that are impossible to use running in parallel form. It also eliminates torso rotation and arm swing no different than the dinosaur. The end result is that runners save energy. That energy savings can be applied to higher speed, or longer distance. The choice is yours.

http://This message has been edited by sport jester (edited Jul-30-2006).

http://This message has been edited by sport jester (edited Jul-30-2006).

Sport Jester,

Just to clear one thing up. In your last paragraph you implied I said that upward movement was beneficial. If you go back and read my post I specifically said it was inefficient. That being cleared up lets move on.

Your post was starting to take the tone of being a little huffy about being questioned. Don't get upset, it is friendly disagreement.

As for your plan of teaching a human to beat a horse in race. I think the outcome is solely distance dependent. I don't doubt many humans could beat a horse in the 40 yd dash. No human could even come close in 200m+. Don't be offended, but I think it is a pretty pointless endeavor.

hough I think your research is interesting and there is something to be gained by understanding animal locomotion I will not put nearly the stcok in it that you do.

Humans have a pretty unique method of locomotion. We can never and will never run like a horse, cheetah or anything else. We are stuck with our inefficient body design and until evolution does something about it we always will be. Thus I feel that most gains will always be seen by studying humans and what humans can do to improve within our physiological limits.

Your assertion that the Kenyans run fast because they live in the same location as the cheetah it pretty ridiculous conjecture. I can think of about 200 ways to shoot down that theory, but I won't waste the space unless you really want to stand by that statement.

What I think the debate comes down to is a chicken vs. the egg type discussion.

Sport Jester and to a lesser degree Ted assert that a fast runner is fast partly because he has a long stride length.

On the other hand I assert that a runner has a long stride length because he is fast. At a given cadence of course.

In my opinion the best way for a distance runner to get better is to flat out ignore stride length and focus on achieving the best cadence for him or her. USUALLY faster is better, to point of course. When the runner learns his/her optimal cadence, increases in stride length come naturally as a by product of increase in fitness (speed over a distance) while the runner consistently holds the correct cadence.

Basically, the more fit you get the more force you can exert on the ground over a longer period of time to accelerate yourself to a higher velocity. If you hold your optimal cadence then of course your stride length gets longer.

Trying to short cut the process to a longer stride length will only lead to inefficiency and injury in my opinion.

sport jester:

Incredible stuff. I thought I was a nerd--about running, about literary scholarship (which is how I pay my bills)--but I was kidding myself. You and Ted are equally hard-core. And you come from what seem to me like opposing philosophical premises. I admit my piker-dom, my know-nothing-ism.

Are you familiar with Berndt Heinrich's WHY WE RUN? Your desire to extract lessons from nature to address the question of how human runners might optimize reminds me of his approach. (If you are Berndt: well, I'm sorry I outed you. It's a great book, in any case.)

One further question, since I'm intrigued by your pairing of Kenyan runners with cheetahs. Can you suggest a couple of specific points about Kenyan stride mechanics, as you see it, that exemplify the way in which Kenyan runners have learned from, internalized, the cheetah's running form? I have a book whose title I forget by a guy who claims--using slo-mo photos of Sammy Kipketer in a road race--that elite Kenyan runners have a slight but discernable forward lean, leading to a footstrike/pushoff behind the center of gravity. This author encourages runners to experiment with this slight, floating forward lean--"riding" our legs as a jockey rides a horse. This jibes well with your approach.

Anyway, is that forward lean what you're talking about? I've also heard people mention the relatively high Kenyan arm carriage. Certainly Limo had this; leading Boston for much of the way, he looked as though he was polishing his fingernails on his lapels, with wrists turned inward and fists rising to Adam's apple height.....