Pose Method of Running by Nicholas S. Romanov, Ph.D.
If you want to be healthy - run. If you want to be handsome - run. If you want to be smart - run. Ancient Greek aphorism
While running is not as obviously creative as music, it too is an outlet for human expression and requires well-honed technique beyond the physical realm. Just as with dance, there is a rhythm and a beauty to running that transcends mere pavement pounding and elevates the act of running well to artistry.
Commentary
I bought this book on a whim several years ago at a used book store. Just recently, I felt compelled to pick it up. The descriptions, references, and quotes made this an unexpectedly fun read. It turned out to be the perfect timing in my running journey to read it.
I suspect that if I had read this at the start of my running practice, it would have been far less valuable. I did find a handful of facts I wish I would have known much earlier in my athletic career, so I might recommend flipping through the contents of it if you are just starting out. However, this is definitely a book written for a runner by a runner. I would put this in the same category of books as Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons. The deeper you go into the practice, the more insightful they become. I suspect I will revisit this one frequently as my running skill progresses.
From a technique standpoint my running form was not terribly far off from this, but I have been tightening up the loose bits and focusing on implementing and maintaining the pose in my daily runs and I have experienced the following:
My calves are sore as hell, but they are adapting.
I am running at the same sustained pace while keeping my hear rate about 20 beats lower. (a portion of this is definitely the slightly lower temps, but still significant)
Post run my legs and body are far less fatigued.
It’s easier to maintain the pose the faster I run
My feet are much quieter interacting with the pavement
When I’m able to disassociate my upper and lower body I really feel zoned in, like I can run forever.
What I’m stealing
Injuries are the biggest enemy of consistency.
Transfer the force of gravity into horizontal movement
Stride frequency, not length, is the key to running faster.
Minimize bounce and maintain a high stride rate.
Disassociate the body from the legs
Reduce tension and concentrate on muscular elasticity
Develop a heightened level of sensitivity to my movements.
Great running is a physical manifestation of extremely strong mental ability.
Supplemental Resources
I can’t help but be moved by her performance.
Oddly enough, Army Holistic Helath and Fitness Drills I shared in MNTS #47 uses the Pose Method in their training instruction.
Dog ears, highlights, marginalia
If you want to be healthy - run, if you want to be handsome - run, if you want to be smart - run.
Ancient Greek aphorism
The Racers run smoothly, with a fine tuned stride like a Wankel rotary engine.
No wasted energy, no fighting the street or bouncing along like a jogger.
These people flow and they flow very fast.
Hunter S. Thompson
Journalist Hunter S. Thompson, whose quote from his book The Curse of Lono opened this chapter, vividly described this transition from "The Racers" to "The Runners" as he described the Honolulu Marathon:
The Runners are different. Very few of them flow, and not many run fast. And the slower they are, the more noise they make. By the time the four-digit numbers came by, the sound of the race was disturbingly loud and disorganized. The smooth rolling hiss of the Racers had degenerated into a hell broth of slapping and pounding feet.
injuries are the biggest enemy of consistency
In Gary Guten's book, he notes the four factors that contribute to sports injuries: change, alignment, twisting, and speed. The first one, "change", is very common with runners and refers to a sudden increase of mileage, distance, frequency, or intensity of training by more than 10% per week. In other words, the runner wants to see some fast improvement and instead commits the most basic training error of all, overdoing it and winding up injured instead of faster
I wanted the runner to get the maximum benefit out of the gratuitous forces of gravity, muscle elasticity and inertia and minimize voluntary muscular efforts that require the expenditure of energy.
Instead of pounding the pavement, you now are virtually hovering above it. Listen. Instead of thud, thud, thud you now hear tap, tap, tap. Focus on the tapping. As your leg speed increases, you want the tapping to become less and less audible. Each brief tap is your only contact with the ground. You are no longer thudding the full weight of your body through the pavement, you're keeping it suspended above the pavement. This is the Incredible Lightness of Running.
Whatever you cannot understand, you cannot possess.
Goethe
When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything.
Shunyro Suzuki
In fact, the role that gravity plays in human movement is so critical that you could say trying to run without understanding gravity is like trying to sail without understanding the wind.
Remember, the boat doesn't use the force of the sailor to move forward; it is the skill of the sailor in capturing the force of the wind that moves the boat forward. In running, it will be your skill in transferring the force of gravity into horizontal movement that determines just how far and fast you can run.
Simply put, superior running technique is the art of releasing the body to fall freely.
Running is simply the changing of support from one leg to the other. Simple as that. One instant, you are in the Running Pose supported on one leg, the next you are in the Running Pose supported on the other leg. Your only objective is to alternate your Running Poses from one leg to the other as quickly as possible. Running is what takes place in between. Running happens.
How fast a body moves is determined entirely by how quickly (Fig.13.2) and efficiently (Fig. 13.3) it changes its support. Interestingly, the perfect change of support comes from the body's willingness to fall.
All the muscular effort to remove the foot from the ground comes from the hamstring. The action of the hamstring initiates the release of the foot from the ground and sets up the direction of the shin and foot movement under the hip.
we don't want to think about trying to use the legs to move the body forward
Instead, all we need to do is pick the foot up under the body nothing more. With respect to the ground, the vertical movement of the body should be minimized as much as possible. The feet move up and down under the body. The body itself remains as still as possible.
In order to reorient that mindset, focus on the lower trunk of your body as you run. Disregard the watch and the visual cues and feel your trunk, in all its stillness, moving forward. The trunk isn't doing any work, yet as the turnover rate of the legs beneath it gets faster and faster, you can actually feel the trunk accelerate. This is the feeling you're looking for - a complete disassociation between the body, which is being accelerated by gravity, and the legs, which are merely changing support at an increasing rate.
The hamstring lifts the foot from the ground, the body begins to fall, the foot returns softly to the ground, and the body stays upright while moving forward. The faster you change support and alternate your poses, the faster you run. It's just that simple.
The lesson here is that the faster a runner's stride, i.e. the faster he changes support from one foot to the next, the faster his forward speed will be. Stride frequency, not length, is the key to faster running.
In his 1997 book Daniels' Running Formula, the respected American coach Jack Daniels noted that there is data from his many years of practical observation that indicates elite runners tend to run with a stride frequency of not less than 180 strides per minute, which he links to good technique.
There's a common phrase race commentators use when the form of a competitive runner begins to deteriorate in the latter stages of a race and it couldn't ring any truer. "It looks like the wheels have come off," they say, and when you look at the runner, you know exactly what they mean. The form and efficiency are gone and the runner is now struggling to finish, no longer a contender for victory.
The meaning of the wheel concept is really very simple: to move with wheel-like efficiency, we must minimize bounce (vertical oscillation), land with support directly under the body and maintain a high stride rate. The Pose Method of Running is designed to accomplish all three of these goals.
While running, you must always remain is this pose as you change support from one foot to the next. By faithfully staying in the pose you maximize the use of your muscular elasticity and resilience and thus reduce your energy expenditures. In fact, a 1964 study (2) indicated that mechanical efficiency of running increased up to 50%, due to contributions from elastic storage and return of energy...
The payoff to "elastic" running is that you can maintain a high stride rate without "going anaerobic" and using up your body's available energy supply of ATP (adrenotriphosphate), the fuel of your highest intensity sprints. Elastic running gives you the ability to run faster for greater distances and still keep something in reserve (1, 3 & 4).
if we attempt to run with a longer stride, we slow down. Why? Again, the answer is simple. In order to lengthen the stride, we thrust the leg out in front of the body. As soon as the leading foot strikes the ground, it is planted there until the entire body passes over it. So, instead of changing support very quickly, the long stride means that it changes very slowly, which interrupts the pull of gravity and slows the forward progress of the body.
The faster you change support, the more permission you give to your body to freefall.
And the faster you fall, the faster you run. Your running speed is directly related to your stride frequency or cadence.
do everything in your power to avoid unnecessary effort and tension. Concentrate and use your muscular elasticity to pull your foot just off the ground, making only the effort necessary to break the point of contact between foot and ground. Focus your efforts on carefully synchronizing your increased stride frequency with the rate at which your body is falling forward and you will soon be running faster...and further... than you would ever have imagined
it's quite a lot to think about. You've got to keep all your joints bent, constantly fall forward, land on the balls of your feet, pick your foot off the ground as rapidly as possible, keep your trunk very still, focus on a rapid stride rate, etc.
Let gravity do the work of returning your foot to support. What this means is that as soon as you have used your hamstring to lift the foot from the ground, you must completely relax the leg and "let" it fall softly back to the ground. Doing this will synchronize the return of the foot to support with the passage of your body over that spot, meaning that your footfall will be exactly where it is supposed to be, in line with your trunk, neck and head.
Practice and thought might gradually forge many an art.
Virgil
The Greeks, those masters of thought, gave us the word "technique", from the root word "techne", which means "art" or "mastery.
While running is not as obviously creative as music, it too is an outlet for human expression and requires well-honed technique beyond the physical realm. Just as with dance, there is a rhythm and a beauty to running that transcends mere pavement pounding and elevates the act of running well to artistry.
Let's return for a moment to the discussion of the previous chapter where we compared learning to run to learning to play classical piano. When a musician is playing the piano, his or her skills directly depend on personal sensitivity in hearing, music tone, rhythm, etc., which have to be developed to an extraordinary level and then translated into the performance. In a sense, the pianist shuts out the outside world and develops a protective bubble occupied only by music.
As runners, we must develop the same heightened level of sensitivity to our movements.
to truly appreciate what we are doing as runners, we must identify these sensations and then develop them to a heightened state. The two most important sensations are gravity and free falling, but to develop them, we have to "tune in" to other feedback: the contact of our feet with the ground, a feeling of effortlessness, shortened time on support, and an overall sensation of lightness.
As you get more and more skilled in developing your running sensibility, you'll become more sensitive to critical sensations like muscular elasticity, effortless increase of cadence and an overall sense of flow in your movement.
what you "feel" would be hot coals. As you're making these light skipping movements, imagine that every time your foot touches down it has just touched a blazing white-hot coal. Your reaction will be swift and purposeful.
The Pony
Stand in the Running Pose, both knees slightly bent, the ankle of the non-support foot slightly elevated (Fig. 24.3). Simultaneously lift the ankle of the support foot while allowing your body weight to shift to the opposite leg, which is relaxed and falling. Sounds simple, doesn't it. It is, but you have to focus on the following sensations in order to it properly:
1) Initiate every movement by lifting the support leg, not by pushing down on the non-support leg;
2) Lift the support ankle vertically, with neither forward or backward direction;
3) Shift your weight without inducing any muscular tension;
4) Allow the non-support leg to fall.
Foot Tapping
Instead, you want to lift the ankle, vertically, so that the ankle, hip, shoulder and head remain in a straight line. So instead of lifting the knee, you want to lift the ankle.
Concentrate on the following:
1) Rapid firing of the hamstring. If you are working with a partner, have him or her gently tap your hamstring every time your foot touches down. This will cue you to fire your hamstring and initiate early muscular contraction.
2) Keep your entire musculature relaxed after the initial firing of the hamstring. If you're successful at this, your leg will decelerate as it is going up, then accelerate as it drops back down. Both the slowing down and the speeding up will be due to gravity, not muscular effort. Remember - don't continue lifting your leg. Just fire the hamstring once and then let gravity take over.
This progression is key in creating the simple biomechanical framework of the Pose Method: the hamstring does the work and gravity pulls you forward.
As you run, you can quickly run through that checklist over and over again, until it becomes a sort of mantra for your run.
1) Check the pose: Am I relaxed and balanced? Am I landing lightly on the ball of my foot, with my foot directly underneath my body? Are my knees still bent?
2) Check the fall: Do I have any muscular tension? Am I braking myself with any body part? Am I leaning with my whole body?
3) Check the foot pull: Am I pulling my foot...and not my leg?
Am I pulling the instant my foot touches the ground? Aml pulling straight up?
As you settle into the run, this mantra or formula for your run can be shortened into a rhythm. Pose-fall-pull, Pose-fall-pull.
From a technical standpoint, it is actually easier to run fast than it is to run slowly in the Pose Method. Where before you might have run like a wheezing pick-up truck, with the Pose Method you now have the technology of a race car built into your body, and everybody knows that race cars love to move fast. At slow speeds, you are staying too long on support, you are standing up too straight, you are landing with too much of a thud, but as you accelerate, everything smoothes out. Your running machine begins firing on all cylinders.
In keeping with the old aphorism "Mens sana in corpore sano", we have to realize that not only does "a healthy body contain a healthy spirit', but the converse proves the rule, without a healthy spirit, you are unlikely to have a truly healthy body.
Great running, like excellence in golf, gymnastics or ballet is really a physical manifestation of extremely strong mental ability.
by stripping away all of the excess and wasted energy in reducing the act of running to its elemental form, we have increased the dependence on mental strength. The technique of the Pose Method is more than just the mechanics of running; it is an integrated approach that demands utter concentration.