Top Three Indoor Treadmill Running Tips

Treadmill Running Advice

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Brandon: Ok, the first thing we do on the treadmill is to show you how to get your foot under your body so it strengthens your body; I’m going to demonstrate this right now.

Joanna: So with the heel striking, we have extreme heel strikers who lean all the way back on their heels so that their legs actually go straight out in front, we don’t want to see that. So you can lean on your heel as long as your heel striking lands underneath your body.

Brandon: Right, Ok. Great. Well we are going to start right now; we thought it would be interesting to show some techniques on the treadmill because we know a lot of you are not getting the runs because of the weather. So what we are going to do is to go on the treadmill and we have Joanna who will take us through a series of exercises and drills.

All right we are going to show a little demonstration today, I have got Jerry to my right and Joanna on my left. Jerry is going to show you what this poor technique is. He is not that kind of runner, but he is going to fake, so watch and he will show us how a lot of people do this poor running form. So as you can see right here he is sitting back looking like sitting on chair. And he is looking like he is really running on his heels, the difference is what we were talking about is his heels were landing in front of his body so it is really like putting the brakes on which is really hard to do on a treadmill but if you are outside he would be putting the brakes on especially downhill, you can see his upper body here he is really tense, he’s almost like a hunchback and I’m pretty sure he is getting tired quickly,

I don’t want him in any pain more, so I will cut over to Joanna here and we will demonstrate what proper performance is, each runner has their own individual blueprint. There are very few people like her because she runs on her toes so much and she runs like a duck but she has got so much better over time, but now you see right away Joanna is running with the same pace as Jerry was on the treadmill but her foot lies right underneath her hips, she is running much taller, she is not crunched over, she is not sitting back, all of her notion is propelling her forward… she is not wasting a lot of energy but Jerry was just wasting energy and reducing himself to a lot of injuries like that. So the key thing here is to run tall and notice where your foot is landing and if it is in front of you start positioning it underneath your body.

Joanna: All right, the second thing we talk about is cadence, higher cadence is very important; it is the key to be more efficient, faster. We often talk about higher cadence running and I may wonder.. I don’t even know what my cadence is. Well on the treadmill it is very easy to calculate it using the clock there. …Every time your right foot hits the treadmill we count that. Do that for 15 seconds multiply that with 4 and we are looking for 90 or above, if you are at 80 or 85 or some people even in 70’s that is much too low. Higher cadence means less effort throughout your race and when you are training you have to go for it. So we have Jerry demonstrate a low cadence…. people think that when they are in slow motion their cadence is going to drop and that’s not the case, if you practice it you can still run in high cadence and at an easy pace.

Alright let’s see Jerry running. The thing with low cadence running is that it really makes you feel like you are lumbering… Lots of people when on basic training the more tired they get the lower the cadence goes so by the end of training if you started off with low cadence your going to be at a very low pace at the end of it. Alright now we take look at higher cadence running is and Brandon is going to run at the exact same pace as jerry, but he will be at higher cadence and sound of landing will not be as high and much more efficient. Alright let’s see his speed, his strike leg is much shorter, his feet are landing underneath him more, so the biggest thing we notice here is his strike is much shorter, his foot is not landing so much in front, he is not landing back on his heel and has less impact on back.

So the third point we talking about is your upper body position and I’m not talking about your arms because everybody’s arms are different …everybody is kind of different in how they hold their arms. We are looking at where the upper body is and we see so much of this people running and bent over and that’s going to cause a lot of problems. Number one it completely affects your ability to breathe if you are like this your whole chest will be cut off; if you are standing tall you will get all the extra oxygen, which is so much better.

Jerry why don’t you show us how it is to hunch over. See he is getting tired and hunched forward, and you can see his chest is collapsing and another problem it causes other than not breathing well is that it causing over strike which we talked about at first. So changing the body position is not that easy as we all have bad habits but this one is also very important because opening up the upper body often changes your running position and you are going to have benefits by changing it. Here we have Brandon, he is standing lot taller, you can see that he is not hunched forward, his chest is tall, his arms are at the back, this allows him to breathe better, this allows him to have higher cadence and he wont trip as he sees where he his going. Well I challenged these two guys to treadmill race and they lost. They did not do that, as they were afraid
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Joanna: Yeah most gyms have mirrors that are easily available about your running… check yourself out.

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