Earlier today I was doing a phone interview with a reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education and she asked me a question that I have been asked a lot lately: “How would you describe good running form?”This is a question that a lot of people have opinions about (sometimes very strong opinions), but I still find it to be a really difficult question to answer. There are a lot of things I can point to that I consider to be aspects of bad form, such as overstriding, excessive side-to-side movement, etc., but really nailing down what represents “good form” can be Asics Gel Lyte 3 Femme tough, for reasons that I will outline below.Whenever I think about the concept of “good” form, the evolutionary biologist in me perks up and turns the question around a bit and asks instead: “How are humans supposed to run?” I’m a firm believer that just like every other animal on this planet, we humans evolved to run in a certain way. The Nike Roshe Run Mens problem is that in modern society, the vast majority of us don’t run that way Nike Air Max TN Mujer because we wear shoes. We did not evolve to run with shoes on our feet. I’m not passing judgment or trying to say that shoes are good or bad (I am a shod runner after all), I‘m merely pointing out the fact that wearing shoes changes our biomechanics in some fundamental ways.So, if I were to attempt to answer the question of how we humans are supposed to run, I would say you simply need to look to people who have never worn shoes and figure out what the majority pattern is. Turns out, Daniel Lieberman did this work for us, and found that the typical running form exhibited by habitually unshod runners looks more-or-less like this:This child is forefoot striking and landing with a bent knee and a roughly vertically oriented lower leg – many suggest these days that these are the elements of good form, and I Nike Air Max 97 Dam would not disagree. Just www.goulvenbazire.fr because Lieberman found that most habitually unshod individuals run with form like this does not mean that habitually unshod runners forefoot strike with every footstep (he observed a few habitually unshod heel strikers, and I have seen my kids do the same on occasion when running barefoot). Rather Lieberman demonstrated that most habitually unshod runners seem to forefoot strike most of the time. However, they also probably land on their midfoot sometimes, and on their heels sometimes as well.Shoes are a game changer when it comes to our running mechanics because they alter the sensory information that comes in from our feet. I witnessed this firsthand a few months back when I ran a little experiment with some students in my Exercise Physiology class. We had been talking about running mechanics, and I decided to take them down Nike Air Max 97 Donne to the lab for a little Adidas Ultra Boost Femme experiment. I had four students run on a treadmill in their shoes, then had them take their shoes off and run in their socks. All the while, I was filming them in slow motion at 300 frames/second. As the students were running, I asked the other students who were watching to tell me what they saw. In particular, I asked them how the runner’s foot was hitting the treadmill surface (note: this is a much softer surface than asphalt or concrete).Upon reviewing the video with them, it turned out that all four students were heel strikers with their shoes on (one was asymmetrical with a midfoot strike on one side), and all switched to forefoot striking when they took their shoes off. No fancy analysis was needed – the kinematic change was as clear as day. One of the students who had participated claimed that it was “like magic,” and many were surprised to realize that their initial thoughts about what the runners were doing based on Adidas NMD Mujer observations from just a few feet away were completely wrong.The above anecdote demonstrates two things. First, removing their shoes fundamentally changed how each of these students ran. The reality is that there was no magic involved – removing their shoes altered the sensory feedback coming in from their feet, and they adapted accordingly. Second, form analysis is really hard to do with the naked eye – high-speed video is really necessary to accurately determine foot strike.