When to Work on Your Form
It's important to remember that changing one component of your form will affect all of the other aspects as well. For example, changing your posture impacts your hip flexion, cadence, footstrike, stride length and almost everything in the biomechanical chain.
The best time to work on your form is during the offseason—not in the middle of training for an event. If you've been suffering from recurring injuries, consider modifying your form sooner than later. If you've been relatively healthy, however, changing your form should occur gradually—if at all.
More: Should You Change Your Running Form
How to Improve Your Running Form
Use this three-part progression to address biomechanical flaws and improve your running form.
- Conscious Incompetence: Understanding the basics of running mechanics and taking steps to improve through strength, stretching and drills.
- Conscious Competence: Running with a better awareness of what you're doing and using cues to remind yourself during a run.
- Unconscious Competence: Having eliminated the inhibitions, you no longer need to think about running with the correct form since it happens naturally.
To advance from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence, it's critical to develop an understanding of running mechanics and the gait cycle. Once you've done this you can add the right exercises in a progressive manner to help train your body and nervous system to coordinate contraction and relaxation, and eliminate structural limitations.
One way to start is to get your gait analyzed and learn the basics of proper running form. Also, make sure to add some basic running drills, like a-skips and b-skips after your runs 2 to 3 times per week. Finally, you can use mental cues like counting your cadence.
Some runners may not find it necessary to alter their form, but if you're a new runner or you suffer from recurring injuries, changing your form could be the key to improving your consistency and performance.
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