Form: the Endless Pursuit

Using your physical state to focus your mental one.

Let’s Talk: Form

Last week, we talked about setting flexible, multi-faceted goals that will serve you for years. This week, let’s bring it down to the daily: let’s talk about form.

Practicing my form back in the ‘90s.

Form & Stoicism

Stoicism has a lot to do with form: concentrating on your running form means a constant meditation on and exploration of parts of yourself over which you can exert control, but over which you can never fully control. Although we might strive to have perfectly balanced form, our bodies are inherently imperfectly balanced, and every experience we’ve had in these bodies contribute to this asymmetry. 

In stoic practice, this edge-of-control is important. Living well means exerting ourselves to be better, in the case of running form, more balanced, but to be able to accept that which we can never achieve, in this case, perfect balance. 

I focus on the minutiae of step-by-step concentration on my form as a way to get to that stoic edge, where I have controlled as much as I can and I cannot go farther. Over years and decades of running, I’ve found it surprising how many things I thought I couldn’t control that I actually can, and how much I used to think I was perfect in that, it turns out, I was basically not controlling at all. 

Practical (But Lesser Known!) Tips on Form

To get you into this focus on form, here are some suggestions for places to concentrate:

1. Release your traps: Scrunching up your arms takes the work out of your abs and puts it into your traps. But your traps can’t do much for you in running.
   
   Concentrate on releasing your hands and letting them flop around while you run. You might feel silly for a little bit, but you’ll feel your neck release and you’ll be less tense.
   

2. Harness your abs for power and efficiency: Abs have a lot more to do with running than lots of people think. Lean forward a little, not back, when you run. Once you do this, feel the pressure on your upper two and middle abs. It’s weird! And possibly pretty fatiguing.
   
   You might not be able to hold this form for more than a few steps, but if you build this strength up, you’ll be able to use your abs to pull your legs through your kick cycle more fluidly and with less effort than you're able to do when you lean back as you run. It seems like a small change, but it can be profound.
   

3. Twist a little. You don’t want to twist too much when you run, but you do need to twist a little. Obliques are the primary muscles that help you make this movement, and engaging them consciously not only produces twisting but also helps lift your body so all the lift doesn’t have to come from your shoulders, hips and knees.
   
   It's all part of using your large muscles for large jobs, and releasing small muscles, like your traps, which we talked about in point 1, for the less load-bearing ones.
   

4. Understanding your true hip distance. So many people either footfall wider or narrower than their hips. It can be tough to tell whether you’re footballing correctly, so get a friend to help or record yourself on your phone. Wobbling out or collapsing in can result in pain in your knees or hips.

   
   Hip distance is tough and will be a lifelong point of concentration for any runner, so don't feel discouraged if you feel like you improve and regress and improve and regress. That's the stoic part of stoic running!
   
   I hope you find these tips helpful! Please let me know if you want any more detail on any of them and I’d be happy to talk more. See you all next week, and for today, remember: go run!