Modern Wisdom - #440 - Shane Benzie - Creating The Perfect Running Form

Episode Date: February 26, 2022

Shane Benzie is a running coach, movement specialist, researcher and the founder of Running Reborn. Shane has travelled around the world to observe and analyse African tribes, Nepalese sherpas and Arctic Inuits in an effort to uncover the fundamentals of elite human movement. He's now applying what he learned to correct and enhance the form of the world's best runners. Expect to learn how sherpas can be so strong, why changing your running cadence isn't a solution, whether minimalist running shoes help or hinder, what Shane learned about ancestral running patterns, plus his breakdown of the optimal head position, foot strike, hand and arm relationship, breathing pattern, stride length and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy The Lost Art Of Running - https://amzn.to/36wiQuu Follow Shane on Twitter - https://twitter.com/RunningReborn  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to this show. My guest today is Shane Benzi. He's a running coach, movement specialist, researcher, and the founder of Running Reborn. Shane has traveled around the world to observe and analyze African tribes, Nepalese Sherpas, and Arctic Inuits in an effort to uncover the fundamentals of elite human movement. He's now applying what he learned to correct and enhance the form

of the world's best runners. Expect to learn how shurpers can be so strong when they're so small, why changing your running cadence isn't a solution to all of your problems, whether minimalist running shoes help or hinder what Shane learned about ancestral running patterns, plus his breakdown of the optimal head position, foot strike, hand and arm relationship, breathing patterns, stride length, and much more. Bit of an update, I am back in Austin after a couple of weeks in New York City. It feels very nice to not be living exclusively out of a suitcase anymore, and I'm looking forward to having some semblance of a routine that will feel pretty good, but it's been a very fun few weeks. I'm going to be talking about what I got up to on some

upcoming episodes, plus the newsletter. So if you want to find out about that, go to But now, please welcome Shane Benzzie. Shane Benzzie, welcome to the show. Thank you for the invite. You were just in Portugal, tell me what you were doing. I was just in Portugal, so I was in a place called Nazare. And Nazare has the biggest waves in the world. So it's on the Atlantic coast and it has huge waves. And I'm predominantly a running coach, but actually more and more I'm becoming

a movement coach with different sports and I'm actually working on a project out there studying and coaching some of the big waves surfers. So these guys are surfing waves up to sort of 70, 80 feet. So I'm really getting excited about, you know, their foot contacts on the board, how are they balancing on that board, you know, what are they doing, what's their perception of their movement, their mental approach to something that's pretty dangerous and that you can't just go out every day on practice because of course these big waves only come sometimes. So I use very clever sensors to put in their boots to kind of have a look at how they're interacting with the board and all sorts of stuff. And that does believe

it or not feedback into running. What is the similarity between surfing and running? So for me, if I'm coaching running, one of the big things I get excited about with running is the foot. The human foot is a very, very clever thing. And I like to think of the foot as the interface between us and the ground. If the foot lands well well and if the foot leaves

the ground well when we run, it creates stability, it creates elasticity, it creates amazing proprioception from the quarter of a million nerves on the bottom of it, it spreads impact, it does loads of amazing things. So if I can understand how the foot interacts with lots of other surfaces and in other sports. And I can learn some very interesting things about maybe how we should land the foot and leave the ground when we run. What are some of the things that you've learned since working with these psychopathic surfers? Well, and one of the other big things about sport as well is the mental approach.

You know, that's extremely important. So we're learning all the time about the foot. The, when I'm looking at foot contacts in whatever sport it is, I'm always looking where possible for what I would call a tripod contact with the board or with the ground or whatever it is you're working with. So I'm learning from them about how they create stability in what is a very kind of dynamic situation and how that foot changes based on their interaction with the board and maybe then I can understand how better we should change and interact our foot as we move over, maybe uneven surfaces or up hills

or down hills because of course they are going up some pretty crazy angles. So yeah, lots to learn and lots of information to swap. I did a similar, well, say similar, I had a collaboration with British diving, so worked with British diving in the lead up for the Olympics and just looking at how the divers have their movement on the board. Not the twirly stuff, that's all really exciting and impressive, but I just worked with them on their three steps on the board and then how they leave the board. So looking at things in my new detail that they may be bringing them back into running, but something we might do tens of thousands of times in a single run. What about fear? What did you learn to do with the mindset of these guys? They're

running, they're swimming out to go down these 60, 70, 80-foot waves, how are they coping with the nerves and anxiety before and during and keeping themselves in their zone? Well I think for sports, you know, for athletes and I think why not when I say athlete? I think that's anybody who does sport. I mean anybody who does anything athletic is an athlete. I think with athletes I think fear, excitement, being nervous. I think they're actually good things because I've produced as adrenaline and that gets us maybe in the place that we need to be.

So I think they are good things. I think what the surfers do a lot of and what I try and get my athletes to do is a huge amount of visualisation. So when they come to surf a big wave, they visualise that wave many times and they visualise what they're going to do on that wave many times and they visualize what they're going to do on that wave many, many times. So they don't try and sort of ward off that nervousness or that fear because you need a healthy respect for the ocean. But yet they channel it, so that the reviews of generally go in the right way and their ability visualise what's going to happen and how to deal with it.

I have a friend, Bridget Fettice, who's a comedian, and she has a little mantra before she goes on stage. Every time that she goes on stage, she gets put a fly in a stomach and a palms get sweaty and a heart rate increases. She just keeps telling herself, I'm not nervous, I'm excited. I'm not nervous, I'm excited. I'm not nervous, I'm excited. And I used that. I've done a couple of big things recently, and I'm not nervous, I'm excited. And I used that, I've done a couple of big things recently and I'm not nervous, I'm excited. It is a really fucking good mantra because the difference between being nervous

and being excited really is just the framing that you put around it. Physiologically it manifests in a pretty similar way. Yeah, I would agree. And you know, but coming on the show today, you know, there's that minute before you're about to sort of hit that button and come on, you think, okay, and I think what I do, and I think what's good for sport

as well is if you get that initial minute right, if you get that first minute right, if you're confident about how you approach, and then you've started in control, then you adapt to where it goes. So you're someone might chalky with a tricky question, and then you'll deal with that, but if you start in control, and if you feel in control, I think that's good. I guess that's what the surfers are doing when they're toad on to that wave by the Jetsky, I think they're thinking, I've done this a thousand times, this is what we do, this is how I'm mentoring the wave, and I'll now deal with the wave in the way that I have to do

with it. But if you start in control, I think that's the best you can do. What do people mean when they call you the Indiana Jones of running? Yeah, so my work really is, I literally do travel all over the world to chasing human movement. That's kind of what I'm doing because if I watch a runner, if I analyze a runner or I'm coaching a runner, I'm coaching a human, you know, about the human species, I'm coaching an animal if you were. And so I travel all

over the world trying to track down what is good human movement. And I trace athletes all around the world to lots of different environments, lots of extreme environments like jungle, Arctic, high mountains, Amazon jungle, rainforests to understand how they adapt to these extreme environments. But I also spend a lot of time trying to indigenous people as well. People who do incredible things with their bodies, but aren't necessarily wearing a race number. But I like going live with the Sherpas who will carry twice their body weight all day, or going to the bat-et tribe in the Malaysian rainforest

who are amazing tree climbers. How are they doing that? So humans are incredibly good at adapting their software, their brains, and their hardware, their body, to different tasks around the world to suit their environment. But isn't that one athlete doing? An athlete is adapting their world to suit their environment. But isn't that why an athlete is doing? An athlete is adapting their body to a specific task. So the more I can understand,

A, what is good human movement, and B, how to adapt that human movement to a specific task, I think the better coach I can be. So I think that's where the Indiana Jones thing has come from is because I'm just constantly chasing this thing around the planet that's, yeah, the hope, hope, that holy grail of what is human movement and how to adapt it and poke. Yeah, it's interesting to talk about it being a lost art. I'm not so sure what you mean by being a lost art. We've just had someone run a sub two hour marathon. It doesn't seem

like running is that much of a lost art to me. Sure. Well, actually, I was there when Ellywood Kichogi did it in Vienna, I was there for the sub-two. So, I mean, he's a good example. So, you know, Ellywood Kichogi didn't run a sub-two marathon because he ran like a hunter gatherer. He ran a sub-two marathon because he ran like a hunter-gatherer. He ran a sub-tumorath because he harnessed all of the gifts that Mother Nature gave him as a running species and then he maximized as much potential as he could out of his software, his brain and his hardware. Yeah, he turned it into human performance. But because the environment that you and I live in is not the natural environment that human grew up in in is not the natural environment that humans grew up in. So before I was working, before I was studying human

movement, I was working with sharks. Okay, so sharks, so it's stuff with great white sharks. So great white sharks have been around for about 400 million years. And their environment hasn't really changed over that time. You know, they just swim around, have baby sharks and need seals. That's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all that's all have an eyelid of that time. And in that time, we've gone from hunter-gatherers to farmers, we've gone through the industrial revolution, and now the technological revolution. So, we're actually like a fish out of water really now. We no longer live in an environment that we were designed to live in. And so, because of that, we're adapting what we do to our new environment. So, it is a lost art lost start movement is becoming a lost start because we no longer the animal that we were so we no longer moving in that way.

And what's really fascinating is if you were to go out this afternoon and run around. It's minus eight in New York City. I'm not going out there and running around. run around. It's minus eight in New York City. I'm not going out there and running around over. Well, you'd have to run just as they alive. Precisely. Yeah, that's true. If you run around Central Park, your movement would actually be based on two big things. There are many things, but the two big things are the environment that you spend your day. And so you're sitting at the moment. So if you spend a lot of your day sitting, your skeleton is essentially free flowing in a sea of tension. It's 206 bones that don't touch each other.

They just sit in a molastic sea of tension. And that sea of tension in your body is created during the day when you're static. You then take that out into dynamic movement. So if you run around in central part, you're actually going to be running with the sea of tension in your body that you've created for the other 23 hours of the day. The second big challenge for us is that our movement is based on our perception of our

movement. Yeah. I think, well, I have no perception. I just run. I just go out for a run. I have no perception. We all do, even if it's a subliminal perception. And our subliminal perception of our movement is one that's based on the traditional view of biomechanics, which makes us feel mechanical. The clue is almost in the word. We make us feel like we're moving as a series of levers and our skeleton is a structure. So we move in a block like mechanical way. But actually that's not the case at all. But because of our new environment, we sit a lot and we're static a lot, and because of our new environment, we are educated about our movement in a way that's based on biomechanics, which makes us feel mechanical.

So those two things are creating a world that means that our movement is almost becoming like a lost language. It's changing because I'm violent and it's getting harder and harder for me to have to go further and further afield to find people that aren't looking down into mobile firms and that aren't sitting even in the last decade. That's become much harder. You have gone and studied a bunch of different groups looking at their movement, looking at how they moved themselves through, and not all of them were runners, right? So the Sherpas, I think you tried to get them to run and basically they weren't, they weren't particularly fantastic at running, but they're very, very good at strong, heavy carries, two times their body weight and stuff like that.

Have all of the people that you studied who had the most beautiful running form naturally? who had the most beautiful running form naturally? So, the East African's, I think, you'd have to go a long way to beat the Ethiopians and the Kenyans, and I think for me, mainly the Kenyans, I think they move beautifully. What is it? How would you characterize the way that they move? They move with a lot of height in their body. It's elegant. Yeah, it's elegant.

They move with elegance. So, this sea of tension, if I'm just going to show you this. if it's a child's toy, but it's actually a 10-secrety model. Now, the concept of 10-secrety or biotens sacredy for you as a human is, as I said earlier, the 206 bones that are your skeleton are free flowing in a sea of tension. So this child's totally kind of tells that story. The wooden dowels are your bones and the elastic stuff that holds the toy together are your tendons and your ligaments and something called Maya Fatcher. So actually when you move your skeleton, it just free flows in a sea of elasticity and that elastic tension is created by your facial system. So if you get beautifully tall in your movement, when you move, you move with a lot of elastic recoil. You have

connective tissue that runs from your toes continuously right up into your skull. Now when the East Africans run, they run with beautiful height in their body, so they really load that elastic system, and they do that beautifully. But you know what's really fascinating, and what I think is really exciting as well, is that when you watch, with Richard Wilson, Dick Sang, Ronitz Caputo, World Record Holders, that I've been lucky to spend time with, you know, they move beautifully. But if I were to ask them to list the top 10 things that made what made them think they

were great runners, they would put movement pretty much at the bottom, which is a little bit disconcerting for me because I'm the movement coach. You know the reason why they put it at the bottom? It's because they don't know they learned it, because they learn it by running in the group. So by flow, by the power of the group, by osmosis, by being surrounded, by beautiful movement, they start to move in that same way. It isn't coached as a technical skill. They just join in with the group they mimic. Yes. Well, I had a guy that wrote a book about René Gerard,

who, you know, his entire thing was this mimetic desire, and he saw it as a social phenomenon, that we want what other people want to want, and then we presume that that's what we want. So, are you saying that there is an equivalent here but, biomechanically, that we see other people around us, we mimic the way that they move, and that becomes a part of... I remember when I was playing cricket growing

up, and you'd see one of the lads that was a quicker bowler than you or a better batsman than you or a better thrower than you, and you'd try and pick apart, at least I would try and pick apart the little things that they did, presuming that there must be some component of their movement, which is contributing to these effective outcomes. And it makes sense, and that I suppose as well, in that way that you don't need to break it down by a mechanically, if you have effective runners in the group and you run with the group and you watch the group, then you become an effective runner as a byproduct of being there.

Completely. And it becomes your default much easier because it wasn't a learned skill. So when you're running so hard and trying so hard that you don't even know your own name, your default is going to be relaxation and beautiful movement because that's how you learned it by running in the group. We could learn a lot from that. We were huge amounts. Is there an implication here that the people who are training and running especially as youngsters that you want to get them into a group with other high caliber, very, very precise movers? Completely, absolutely. And again, I think it's one of the things that certainly

in the UK or the we don't do so well. And you know, and it is a challenge because if you had three groups of runners and you were going to take them running, it makes sense for the faster runners to run together than not so far and then they're pretty slow. But it means the pretty slow never gets a mimic. The first size, you end up with this sort of them in a scenario where it starts to split out, yeah. But what the East Africans do, which is ingenious, is that so they have the same problem because boy, they've got some very, very fast runners and some faster runners and not quite so fast.

So everything's up a level, but there are different speeds. But these are this very clever thing where they will have a grid system. So you think of something four type of like, maybe four soccer fields, the size of four soccer fields. And they will have the runners running, but it's in diagonals across these football fields, or they make the size of four soccer fields and they will have the runners running but it's it's in diagonals across these football fields or they make the size of these soccer fields so they run in diagonals

so you are constantly running past world record holders you're constantly then running behind them then towards them you're always moving in different angles across these pitches but you never leave the best runners in the world even even though you're a complete beginner. And that's why they've done it. Is that one of the reasons they've said that they've done it to get people around these beautiful, run-of-form guys? Yeah, so they can see each other moving, and also it's easier for the coaches to be in the middle of those diagonals and watch everything that's going on. Nobody really disappears. Oh, yeah, of course, because you don't actually have to go all that far away, but you can

still run a far distance. That's really, really clever. It is. It's ingenious. You can have, you know, sometimes you can have as much sport science as you like and, you know, as much funding as you like, but sometimes just the simple things are really, really helpful. Look at your sun's matchbox cars track setup and just duplicate that for a running method, yeah? Yeah, it works amazingly well. And people may be listening to the podcast might be able to relate to this. If you do a marathon or a half marathon, sometimes it's an out and a back. And as you're still going out, the fast ones are coming back.

And for that fleeting moment, you see them and you think, wow, look at them. Well, that's amazing. You get to see them for two hours just constantly weaving in and out very it's a great thing and we could I think we could learn a lot from that. So if that's the Kenyans and they're the best runners on the planet talk to me about the Sherpas because they're strong guys, Nims Perger who did the 14-peaks challenge he uh he was on the show a little while ago and he's a complete freak too. Yeah, they're incredible.

I mean, and this is, so I'd been to Nepal, I used to climb and I'd been to Nepal maybe 25 years ago and was in complete awe of the show for them but wasn't a coach or a movement coach. I just thought they were amazing people. But then when I started to become a movement coach and started to think, right, okay, well, what is strength? You know, what is strength? I think we in the Western world see our strength as muscle. Yeah, if you're talking about strength, we tend to think of muscle strength, but I don't, I don't see that. I think that it comes from actually a symbiotic relationship between bone, muscle and fature that like natural bruise toy it creates that sea of tension.

And just like I thought right okay well where do I think the best runners in the world are? Where are the strongest people? Where are the strongest people? And I'd seen when I was in Nepal 25 years ago, Sherpas carrying almost comical loads. It was just absurd where you could barely just see a little pair of legs and just this huge load to the point where it looked like something out of a car soon. And I thought, right, I'm going back, I'm going to study it. And I've found an amazing guy. And he allowed me to come to his village. He's a very remote village. You can only trek in. And I stayed in in the village and the Sherpas, there were three Everest Summators in the village and the back, as it was off the climbing season, so I think

there's like 24 summits between them and it was also spending time in the Sherpa community. Trying to understand and crack this code of why they are so strong and you actually pretty slight and certainly not muscular to look at. And also, why would they carry everything around their head? When all the smart people are carrying big weights over their shoulders, you would think. So, A, why can they carry weights that we couldn't even look at and why they are suspending them around their forehead. Why would they do that? I found that really, really interesting. And if we can learn, I've got right, if I can learn why they can do that. And that's going to give me some really good ideas about how maybe runners can run with small packs on their back or in that. And I've worked,

I've worked with the military as well. And obviously carrying weights and stuff like that is obviously pretty important. So I went out to a little bit of the Sherpas and to study them and to understand them, studying the power of the group as well, which I would love to talk to you about, because I think that's massive. It's everything actually.

So studying the power of the group and also how they move. And they really did show me that actually it isn't muscle strength at all. It is this symbiotic relationship between bone, muscle and faster. That doesn't just create an elastic body. Very strong body. And this continuous elastic tissue that runs from our toes continuously up our body actually finishes in our skull in the top of our head. And that's why they carry the weights around the forehead because if you hang something off your shoulders,

you've actually cut off the last link of your strength and elastic chain. By suspending something around your head, you incorporate every single part of the chain. Presumably they don't know, or they haven't broken down the biomechanics of how the facial system works. What they've done is they've tried it on the shoulders, they've tried it in their hand, they've tried it around their waist, they've tried it, they've attached

to their knees, dragging it behind them, and they've ended up saying, look, it would appear, so it's just an evolution of what was most effective. Absolutely, and if you travel around the world and go to the mouth more far from places, people are carrying things either around their head or on their head. Yeah, well, you see that with ladies carrying water for the tribes, right? You know, going to whatever the local well is and then carrying it back on top of their head. Yeah, it's so interesting when you see taking the approach that you have is somebody that

does the sports science, you know, real technical analysis of running movement and so on and so forth. But then when you go and you just look at evolution of what was effective, what was it that people did who were good at this thing? What are they doing? How can we then repurpose that? So we're having to re-engineer our movement in this way. Yeah, yeah. I think it's the way because you know a human six million years ago we would have been quadruped so we would have went on all fours and very muscular with a lot of muscle and we wouldn't have moved really very far. We had probably moved around about the size of those four soccer fields. Why did we need a much muscle? Why did we need so much muscle? Well, I think it's

a good point. I don't know because if you were a if you were a primate you wouldn't actually need to have a huge amount of muscle to to get your food. But carrying stuff. No, but then I guess if you're competing for a mate it probably helps to be pretty strong. And really, evolution is about the strongest or the fittest or the most able to reproduce passes on their genes. So I guess through evolution, the stronger you were, the more able you were able to get a mate. Well, one thing could be that the muscle size is less a function and more a signal. It's not that you're actually concerned

about what the muscles can do. It's that these muscles are almost like everybody knowing that you've got some nukes in the arsenal. You don't necessarily need to even use them, but if you didn't have them, they wouldn't work as a deterrent. And if you're looking to signal, I am a strong and capable provider to my family.

And I mean, I've heard some stories about two or three chimps can quite easily rip another chimp limb from limb. Oh, they do it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a pretty disturbing site. And I think it's a disturbing site because we kind of relate ourselves quite, that was us not long ago. Yeah, absolutely. And it can be quite a disturbing thing to see. But we took a different, So we would have been six million years ago, those quadrupeds and quite muscular and really not moving very far off those four soccer pitches. And then we did two things. We developed a very clever foot and we developed the ability to stand

tall and get elastic. That meant we could cover more ground with more efficiency, catch more food, get bigger brains, get a space program. Now, I'm not saying we'd cover more ground with more efficiency, catch more food, get bigger brains, get a space program. Now, I'm not saying we'd be more successful than the primate, but a human's USP is a very clever foot and the ability to stand tall and get elastic and dynamic and efficient. So when it comes to playing sport, if your sport allows it, we should get as much height in that body as we can, because that's a human's USB. Given the fact that the Sherpas aren't jacked out of their minds, bodybuilder style guys, what if you learned is, what is the function of strength or what is the contributing elements to strength?

If the body builder or the power lifter or the cross-fitter isn't the person that can carry the most weight per kilo of body mass, it's the Sherpa. What is it that they're doing? Where is that strength coming from? So, it's a good question. So strength and conditioning is huge at the moment.

Yeah, there's a lot of strength and conditioning in sports. And let's, let's say we were coaching running. Yeah, let's say we were, we were coach talking about coaching running here. If I went to the gym and I did a lot of squats and lunges and were lifting weights in the gym to get strong, really, I'm getting strong at lunging and squatting and I'm getting strong at lifting weights. It's not really taking into account the deceleration as I hit the ground when I run. It's not really taking into account the impact that I create when I run.

And it's not taking into account the range of motion. So, I think what's happening and what's happening more and more is we're building strength, but which is not that strength is not specific for the sport that we want to do. So we're sure that it doesn't get up at six o'clock in the morning and go to the gym and bump higher to get good at carrying twice their body weight. What they do, carry twice their body weight. And obviously they have to build up to that with weight. But they do the task.

And if I watch the Staphyricans when they're running, largely I see them running and doing their strength and conditioning on the move. If you run, if you do any kind of activity, you're stressing bones, you're tearing muscle fibers, yeah, and you're tearing fascia. They will be rejuvenated, re-architect, remold it, rebuilt during recovery.

So, end it. Fast better. In this way, in the current modern approach for strengthening for particular pursuits, have we just overcomplicated it? Have we thought that we can use strength and conditioning kit and a hex bar deadlift and a bunch of elastic bands and stuff. In order to create quicker, more appropriate adaptation, whereas we should just be doing more of the specific pursuit that we're trying to do ourselves. Yeah, I think there's definitely a balance. I think there's definitely a balance, but yes, I think we are, I think there's a tendency

to move away from trying to do the actual movement beautifully and have in mind that by doing that movement beautifully, you're breaking down the body and it will re-architect itself. So it's what I would call Darwinian fitness. Yeah, so fitness to perform the task, that's how we evolve. So if you want to throw the javelin, you can go in the gym and get very strong and build a very powerful body, but that's software and the hardware. It doesn't need to say that it's good at throwing the javelin. If you go out and throw the javelin 20 times, you're going to stress the body and then the

body will rebuild itself, allowing you to do that task better. So I'm sure there's a balance. And I, as a coach, my job is to get the athlete thinking because that's what coaching is. I think if you drill someone, you just get them someone to do something a lot in the hope they get better at it. And that will probably happen. They probably will get better if they do it a lot. But if they think about how they're doing it and why they're doing it, and they take ownership of it themselves,

and they're very cognizant about it, that's when they maximize their potential. And I think that's what a coach should hope to do is empower the athlete to take ownership of that skill, not just drill them lots of times to do it. There's something that I've noticed with some of my friends, I'm friends with a bunch of different buddies who are elite level crossfitters, another sports guys as well.

There seems to be, and I want the ones that are listening to take this in the nicest way possible, there seems to be a good blend of thoughtfulness and ignorance stupidity that is important to be an elite level athlete. And what I mean by that is that you need to take enough of a detailed approach of the things that you are doing in order to really be able to cover all of the different bases. However, the guys I know that overthink, they don't just follow the training plan sufficiently. You know, there's a level of insight and intellect that you need to have in order to be able to talk yourself out of your

own training plan. And some people can be too smart for their own good when it comes to training and start to question the things. There is an amount of sort of dunderheaded, amount of sort of dunderheaded, neanderthrole approach that you need. Look, it's a 60-minute monostructural workout just at like a zone two or a zone three on a Thursday morning. It's the most boring, standard workout that I'm ever going to do. You just need to go and do it. And yet, I've certainly seen friends in the past who will, well, if I can add some intervals into, I know it says on the training plan that I'm supposed to do X. So is there a sweet spot here between the level of detail that the athlete is supposed to take and then the amount that they're supposed to kind of switch that off and then just rely on the programming

too? Yeah, I absolutely, I think there is a balance and I think that's where you need that coach to control the overall thing and to be able to say, well look, this is the schedule and this is what we should be doing. Yes. The athlete is that only personal on every run or every wave or throwing every javelin or fencing or whatever it might be. So they're the ones that can feel everything,

they're the ones that have to make the the split decision. So they need as much ownership of it as they possibly can because in any sport, the moment the whistle or the horn goes off, all bets are off. It's all on them. Yeah, everything's changing now from now and it's the person that can adapt the best. And if you've just just been drilled that's not really conducive to adapting to something but we're almost certainly happened. How far were our ancestors running in one go? So there's my go to person, the person that I love to listen to and I think makes absolute sense is a guy called Daniel Lieberman, a professional Lieberman, I don't know if you've heard

of him or not. Absolutely amazing guy, a runner, anthropologist, fantastic. He was going out to Kenya a long time ago and looking at how everyone was moving, he's absolutely fantastic. So he would say, they would run about maybe a half marathon, at about a four hour marathon pace. at about a four hour marathon pace. So to go back to my original statement of Kip Jovy did not break the sub two by running like a hunter gatherup, because clearly he would have pulled up a bottle. Yes, yes. There was some running, there was quite a lot of walking, yeah, and actually, you know, a lot of times sitting and digging groups and doing stuff like that. So what we're doing

now is taking human movement and turning it into human performance. And that's when we have to adapt our software and our hardware. So it's really interesting because if you look at humans, if you watch a human move, humans are very wonky in balanced things. A human has a stabilizing leg and it has a probing leg, has a stabilizing arm and a manipulating arm because of different sides of the brain. Well, that's how a human's designed, but if you want to squeeze as much performance of a human as you can, you need to eradicate those and create as much balance and symmetry in the body as you can, certainly for running. Different sports might need different things if it's a very one-sided sport with one side of the body. So we're taking...

And this is why it's a challenge because we're taking this fish that is out of water that is not living in the environment it was designed to be lived in anymore and now trying to squeeze incredible performance out of it to do ever more amazing things. And that's why we have to really think about it, rather than just try hard or just do it a lot. So you're saying that persistent-sunting typically would have pulled up at... The animal would have overheated within 13 miles or we would have lost it on average, something like that. Yeah, so we said so we would have lost it on average something like that.

Yeah, so we would have run walked. So essentially, yeah, so we would have walked and run, walked and run. So yeah, but essentially the idea of the system, something is you get an animal that's technically much faster than you over a shorter distance, keep it in an ebony in eyesight and just keep it moving because it can't carry water and it can't sweat. So it's going to overheat a lot quicker than us. What I suppose is the thing that I had in my head, because I've never persisted and funded, surprisingly, is that the animal would have just gone and then gone, and you might have lost sight of it, but if I was an animal,

and I knew that I didn't have an unlimited gas tank, I would run faster away than I'd turn around and look, and I'd wait and see, are they still coming? Oh, shit, they're still coming, right? Okay, I'll run a than I'd turn around and look and I'd wait and see are they still coming? Oh shit, they're still coming right? Okay, I'll run a bit more, turn around and look. So I suppose that yeah, the fact that you would stop, I guess the guys would maybe be stopping to make sure that the tracks are going in the right direction if perhaps they've lost sight of it directly. Absolutely, their track is as much as Hunters in the Exile, you're not going to be able

to keep that animal in your view the whole time so their ability to track and understand, almost put their self in the animals, position. Where would it run? Yeah, it's going to steer clear of those trees, it's going towards that, whatever. Yeah, exactly. And the acceleration and the constant acceleration and deceleration, the stopping and starting of the animal is incredibly tiring. If you go to a shopping mall or if you you go to a museum, and you're walking around, stopping and looking, and walking,

and stopping and walking around, and looking, that's actually quite tiring. And it's because of that constant stopping and starting, accelerating and decelerating and stopping. You're far better just rolling along. Because I think we, you know, even it's interesting with certainly with running is we built up this incredibly adversarial relationship with the ground. Because we blame the ground for impact and we bring impact for injuries. And so we try and avoid impact. And so what's really interesting is, so we built up this very adversarial relationship with the ground almost and we've almost become scared of the ground and at the moment we can sort of, the moment we can step up and walk across the kitchen floor for the first time,

our feet are rammed into shoes to protect us from the dirty ground. And so we don't have a great relationship with the ground. And yet when I travel all around the world and see people that are growing up in their feet, they have a view of relationship with the ground. They're not scared of the ground. They hit the ground beautifully and create elastic energy and springs them off, where it is we're trying to spend as much money as we can to buy very clever trainers that will claim to protect us from the ground and make it. Yeah, so I mean, this has been probably the most interesting thing to watch as a non-runner over the last few years. It's been the development in shoe technology and then the subsequent litigation that's

come in, you know, the solution that was created in order to restrict the amount of real estate and technology that can go into shoes was just to restrict the stack height Right, that was the solution. Okay, you have this amount of real estate to play with which is why the soul fits within that Put a rocket booster put 25 carbon plates do whatever you want, but this is how much you have if you look at what kept show gay Broke the two our marathon barrier in they like platform shoes. They're almost comical. They're so big, these huge things. So what are your thoughts about the modern developments in running shoes and then also what are your thoughts

on minimalist running shoes or barefoot running shoes? So I think the big thing is that we should try not to get so excited about any kind of shoes and just get really excited about the human foot. Because as I said earlier on, the human foot, as well as been able to stand tall, the human foot, the very clever human foot, is our USP. It creates, because everything we're trying to create with technology is emulating what the amazing human foot has, creating stability, creating elasticity, spring, dissipation of

impact, proprioception. The foot's amazing at all of that. What we're actually doing is wrapping that amazing foot in rubber and then putting some technology on it. So what I would urge everybody to do is get excited about their feet first of all, because you could spend $10,000 on a pair of trainers. It's not going to make you land with a tripod landing. You could spend 20,000 pounds on a pair of trainers. It's not going to make you leave the ground correctly. So, you know, we can't buy our way out of trouble. I think it's easier to order something and for it to turn up on the doorstep when we put them on and it's a magic

pair of trainers and now all our troubles are solved. We'd rather do that than spend 12 weeks learning to move differently. So let's not get suckered into that and let's create an amazing human foot that has an amazing relationship with the ground and then let's put our foot in a pair of trainers that helps our foot interact with the environment it wants to move through because that's what the trainers should be doing. Because clearly our feet can't, we can't run around bare feet anymore. We just don't have those feet, we can't do it. I mean, people do in other parts of the world, but we can't, we don't have that foot anymore.

So we need to utilize this amazing human foot that then choose something to put it in that allows us to stick to rock or run through mud or whatever it might be. So that the trainers interact with the environment, but we do all the clever stuff with our foot. That's where I think. What about minimalist shoes? Well, it would make sense because we kind of want, and we want to emulate, you know, how our ancestors move and move naturally. It would make perfect sense to go to something

completely minimalist because then we'd be there. But again, we're not that animal anymore. And so we have to be very, very careful about wearing something minimalist with zero drop because that's going to put our Achilles tendon and our calf muscles under a lot of pressure because that's not what we've been doing. And suddenly we've got, we're running around, we've got two and a half times our body weight coming back at us because that's what it is when you're running It's around two and a half times your body weight That can create a huge amount of stress on the body the body has to adapt to that And so if we are gonna go to something minimalist

We have to be a very slow To transition yeah, what bone remodeling takes 17 weeks So if you started to move differently today, it takes 17 weeks for the bones to kind of remodel and create density where they need to be dense. So, you know, running around in the park in an actual bare feet or something very minimalist can be good fun, but be very, very careful. And again, don't assume that wearing next to nothing on your feet will make you move beautifully as well, because it doesn't, we have to learn that skill.

And then choose a pair of trainers that allow us to do it. A very wide toe cap in the trainers is good to allow that foot to display. Okay. Or it sends a hem our feet in with trainers. So a nice wide toe cap is a good thing to display. Okay. It's into hem-arphee in with trainers. So a nice wide toecap is a good thing to have. You see that in, I think, a lot of the shoes that are really architected to try and have good foot movements that they seem to be, almost if you look at them, kind of like flippers,

you know, they kind of, they look a little bit silly at the end, but presumably that's for the, exactly, this reason to give it a bigger toe toolbox so that you have that room for everything to move. So, okay, we've sort of spoken about some of the key principles that you think contribute to great running form. One of them's been this tripod landing. What's that mean? So, tripod landing is essentially when we land the foot. If you imagine you've got, so a tripod has three points to it, you've got a point just sort of underneath the ball of the big toe, a point underneath where the ball of the little toe would be, and then the heel, the calcainus. So you can almost draw that tripod. If you get that tripod landing, tripod gives us stability, so we get instant stability when we land.

And then the tripod landing allows the arch of the foot to work correctly. The arch of the foot gives our foot its strength. That's why we use archies in architecture. And the arch of the foot also creates a dome effect for the foot. If we land on the tripod landing, the dome effects of the foot works and we use domes in architecture because we want to spread weight. So, and also if we land on that tripod landing, it means we load it something called our planter fascia correctly, which because we want to spread weight. So, and also if we land on that tributalany, it means we load it to something called our planter fascia correctly, which is a beautiful piece of elastic that runs along the bottom of the foot. We load that planter fascia, that piece of elastic that spring is a soft.

And then, maybe the most important subject, but for me, I get very excited about it. You've got a quarter of a million nerve endings on the bottom of your foot. Okay, there are more nerves in your feet than there are your hands. Two types of nerve endings, extra receptors. The extra receptors, they tell you how hard you hit the ground and what the ground felt like, was it bumpy, soft, rocky moving. And then you have proprioceptors in that nerve network, they give you your spatial awareness and they give you a perceived rate of exertion, how hard you're trying. So every time you're foot lands, those quarter of a million nerve endings are telling you everything you want to know about your environment that you're running over it. So if you get the tripod landing, you instantly get all of that information.

When you say tripod landing, do you mean heel and those two ball points strike at the same time that if you were to put them onto the floor, that they would be straight down? That's. Okay. What is the most common type of foot striking mechanism that you see at the moment? So over the last decade, I've worked with over 4,000 runners and many in groups but 4,000 runners where I've videoed them and worked with them and all the time I'm coaching them also taking data up until the last 18 months or so of that 4,000 runners that I saw

84% of them heel strike. So They land on their heel first on a relatively straight leg, yeah, 84%. That's now at 63%. So over the last 18 months, that's changed, it's got, it's changed to 63%. So it's coming down. What's happened? That's a really big difference over 18 months. What's happened? Well, I guess to a large degree, a lot of the people that come and see me have read my book. And there's a selection effect going on there. Yeah, you'd have to assume, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so some worldwide pandemic, we didn't realize that COVID, it actually changed people's

foot strikes. It's not, it's not good for breathing, but it's fantastic for your date and your cadence. It could be the thing, it couldn't be by dog, be by book, it's all that vibe, it's just wishful thinking. Yeah, maybe. But yeah, lots more people that are coming, and I work with my video analysis with people on six continents as well, and even, and we're seeing it with them as well. So it's coming down, I mean, you could argue that that's, that's not good enough, you know, I should write a better book, it should be better, it should be less than sixty 62, I should up my game a little bit here. But yeah, so that's what you're generally seeing and that's what we see. Now, and it's interesting because a human is

designed to land on its heel when it walks. That's what a human does. If you went for a walk around Central Park now, you would be landing on a hill on a relatively straight leg and then rolling through. So what happened a few decades ago now is we started running with a walking gate. Yeah, so the difference between running and walking is when you walk one foot is always on the ground. When you run you get air. Both feet come off the ground at the same time during the stroke. So we can be running technically because we're getting air, but we're doing it with a walking gate. Jogging, I guess. That's how much people would describe it as jogging. So you... Listen, there's no such thing as bad exercise, by the way.

You know, it's good to get out and do stuff. But essentially what I'm seeing a lot of is people technically running, but with a walking gate landing on that hill on a straight leg. Why? Because I think really, because they're running relatively a slow pace and so they're not creating very much air. And so there isn't any air for us to get our legs circling and cycling underneath us. So the leg can only land out front straight because we've been told one of the big urban myths of running.

There are lots of urban myths of running. One is that impacted bad or running around quite a bit. Well, impact turns into elastic energy and throws you forward. One of the other big urban myths is that air or bounce in your run is bad, is inefficient. We are told to suck ourselves down to the ground. But if you think of your stride, the stride is a curve. It kind of is, you leave the ground, you go into the air, and then you land. Your stride is a curve. If you emit the amount of height you get in your curve, you could

only have little curves. So we're all running around trying to suck ourselves down to the ground because we've been told that's efficient. So all we can do is land on a hill on a straight leg out in front of us, which ironically means we don't dissipate the impact we've been trying to avoid by going high. Interesting. Yes. So this sort of shuffle is a function of people not running particularly quickly and also trying to limit the amount of impact that they're hitting the floor with. I see this in myself. I've never had running analysis done, but when I think about the way that I run, I absolutely

heel strike. I'd think about the pre-nation of the foot and about where I'm striking it. I didn't think that I was supposed to land with that tripod position. What about head position? I know that's another big part of this. Head position is absolutely fundamental and it's really exciting because it's fundamental and incredibly doable to get it right. We go back to how a human was designed and evolution. A human was designed to evolution, a human was really designed to understand how very tall, look around for food and make sure that they didn't become food. So the head belongs up with the eye line on the horizon, essentially.

And so if we've talked about this elastic, connective fascia, this tissue that runs continuously from our toes up into our skull. We need our head up eye line on the horizon because that creates beautiful detention then in our elastic system. Also, you're in the ear, you're vestibular area, you're in the ear. That's where your balance and spatial awareness comes from. So the head really needs to be up where it was designed to be for that balance and spatial awareness to be right. If it's down, then that's a problem. And walking around with mobile phones and just sitting looking at mobile phones, we're

just saying, so much about time now with our head down. Huge, isn't it? What's the difference in weight between your head when it's up and your head when it's leaning over? So, your pounds are a kilo. What are we going, pounds? Kilos, kilos. So your head, the human head weighs,

some of that weighs slightly more than others, but the human head weighs around about five kilos, okay? When it's eye line on the horizon, for every inch forward it comes forward, it weighs another five kilos. So if your head is three inches down, you've now got a 20 kilo head. Now actually the head itself doesn't get heavier.

It's a moment's thing in physics. It's essentially spread. So it's actually the up and the spide that is now taking that quadruple weight. Yeah. And so, and I tell you what's really been interesting is with the pandemic we've had over the last couple of years and people are wearing masks, of course, actually to see your

phone because the mask restrictions you view people are heads are coming down even further. So instead of putting the phone up in front of our faces, actually we crane our head even more to allow- Wow, yeah, of course. So when we were joking here and I wanted about the pandemic and does it make you land on a tripod and all of this sort of stuff. Well, actually, one of the offsets from this, which is pretty intangible at the moment, but people's head positions are changing quite substantially. Another probably, another five kilos on the distribution weight of your head because of a mask. I can see it.

Even though the mask weighs three grams, the impact of the mask is causing you. That is so interesting. What about, um, talk to me about stride length. Stride length in cadence and turnover and stuff like that. So, so, yeah, so cadence, we've all come, we've all got pretty obsessed with cadence over the years. I think biggest cadence is the first one, the first running dynamic that we could monitor.

And so it's the one that the technology joined in with first. And so if anybody listening, it doesn't know what cadence is, it's essentially how many times I'll feed hit the ground in a minute. And the holy grail of cadence has always been talked about as being 180. So we are told that when we run around, we should be hitting the ground 180 times a minute. Three times a second. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, and that's true as it goes, but not for the reason we've been told generally.

So remember I said 84% of those 4,000 runners were heel striking on a straight leg and that's now one down to 62%. Well the average cadence for that one was 163. Okay. So the average runner if there is such a thing is running around at 163 cadence landing on a heel on a straight leg. And we don't want that. So what started to happen was coaches would get metronomes and put a metronome onto somebody or just get them running at a cadence of 180. So they speed their cadence up from 163 on average to 180, which meant that their feet would turn over quicker and land more underneath them no longer on a heel. quicker and land more underneath them no longer on a heel. So that sounds like a good antidote, but it's a bit a little bit like sticking a plaster over a fracture because you've tricked the

person into not heel striking anymore. You haven't changed it, gates, you haven't really changed anything, you just made them have stride length of a mouse so that people land underneath them. But the moment they try and run faster again, or open their stride, they're just gonna go back to landing on a hill on the straight. So for anybody listening out there who's monitoring their cadence, do not let cadence dictate your form. Cadence isn't about correcting your form.

The reason we should get excited about cadence is, and actually the figure should be between, I believe, one, seven, five, one, one, eight and 185 that's what the cadence we should be looking for. So it doesn't actually 180, it can be between 175 and 185 because when you're running, when your foot hits the ground, as I said earlier, you're about two and a half times your body weight coming back at you. That impact coming back into your body creates a load of elastic energy in the body. And that elastic energy has a frequency. Everything has a frequency. A frequency of creation, store and release of elastic energy. So the foot hits the ground, bang, you've created the elastic

energy. Yeah. In softens as you pass over the foot, it stores it, and then as the foot leaves the ground, the elastic energy fires. Amazing, you've created the energy from nothing, you stores it, and then as the foot leaves the ground, the elastic energy fires. Amazing, you've created the energy from nothing, you store it, and then it leaves with you, with you leave the ground. But only if you run at a cadence, which sinks in with that elastic frequency. And that's what that 175 to 185 is. So if you went out and run around central park at a 180 cadence, you can be as confident as we can be and they need to be more research on this, but as confident as we can be, that every time you hit the ground, you create elastic energy, you store it as you move through the sky, and then you chew off with a burst of elastic energy. That's really exciting. You wouldn't want to be out of sync of that. So that's why cadence is important.

What should people do with their arms and their shoulders and their hands? This is something that I've never had any idea what I'm supposed to be doing. Yeah, so I think when we run, you know, if you pulled a hundred people in and said, you know, what do you run? What do you do? Everyone would say, well, you're run with your legs. You use your legs to run. Well, you know, running is a full body exercise. Every single piece of your body is moving when you run. We have no dividing lines in our body,

only connecting lines. And actually, because of our very dexterous hands, because we do everything with our hands and our arms, they're closer to our brain than our legs, we can see them. I think it's fair to say, we have a better relationship with these than we do our legs. So what that means is in movement, in dynamic movement, especially in running, is the arms are incredibly dominant over the legs. So your kinetic movement is such that you're right arm and your left leg move together and you're left arm and your right leg move together and you're left arm and your right leg move together

That's the way it is, but these very very clever things are telling are not very bright legs what to do So if you're running around with your legs Carrying your arms and not doing much with them because you can't really leave them at home But you don't want to waste any energy with them because you want to save the energy for your legs The arms just not doing much are sending very very difficult messages for the legs to have to cope with. So Kippsank, Kuputo, Kippchogida, they would all time it, they're on with their arms. They are arms to run. So the arm swing we're looking for is a very, very relaxed shoulder and all the dynamic movement is done with the elbow and always to the rear. So the arm is driving constantly to the rear. Very relaxed shoulder arm movement to the rear because that's

then telling the leg to land underneath you and come out behind you as well. So you're not pushing the arm forward. Correct. You pull the arm back, you allow it to pendulum through to the front, and then you pull back. And then you pull back. You never see any air really here. Everything is to the rear, to the rear, to the rear. Oh, so are you saying that your upper arm wouldn't ever go much past sort of 90 degrees? Correct. Oh, so it's even more than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because if you're very clever, right arm drives forward, you're not very bright. Left leg is going to follow it and you're going to land on that heel on the straight leg. So many of those 84% of those 4,000 runners that heel striking are doing it because their

arms are coming out in front of them. Am I right in thinking that by having this slightly more posterior focused arm movement, that it's going to force us into a more open chest and a more upright posture? Doesn't hurt, absolutely right. If you're thinking about, I talk about this center line in your body, which is an imaginary line that runs from your belly button

up through the abdomen, up through the chest to the top of the head. When you're running, you open up that center line and put a bow into that center line. That gets your upper body over your centre of gravity. It puts more surface area into your elastic system. It brings your hips forward and gets a nice neutral pelvis. And then the arms driving to the rear just completes that beautiful position. You're absolutely right. What about hands? Hands, fists open, whatever's comfortable? No, this is exciting. So hands, so we want balance and symmetry in our arms

because our arms are dominant over our legs and running is all about balance and symmetry in the body. So if you want balance and symmetry in your arms, your hands must do exactly the same thing. If you run with one hand open and one thumb up, the hand will stop and the thumb will go up, you know, the hands, the hands, then the arms are in crazy positions. So what I love to see is if you have your index finger onto your thumb like so, and then the other three fingers just run a lot, that's it, perfect. So you would run like that.

If you do that, both hands are completely symmetrical. You know that they are. Your fingertip, your index finger on your thumb is the perfect tension sensor for your body. If you squeeze those fingertips, you can feel the tension going up your arm, just moving through your body. If your fingertips are soft, you know the arm is soft. So when

you're running and muscle tension is an athlete's nemesis, we want a elastic tension but not muscle tension. So when we're running, if our fingertips are soft, we know that the upper body is relaxed. If these are tense, we know know the tension is sweeping through it. It's like a canary in the colmy. Completely, completely. And what also happens is your wrist, your elbow and your shoulder, those joints have tendons and ligaments in those joints that are holding the joints together and holding muscle to bone. They do that job.

But the tendons and ligaments also propriocept their position in space. So just like the proprioceptors on the bottom of your foot The proprioceptors in your joints are giving your dark silence skull a position of your arm as you move If your fingertips are touching you lock in that proprioception That's up. So you have a better spatial awareness of your arms if your fingertips are touching. They're also great tension sensors and they do something completely symmetrical. That can honestly be a game changer for runners. I like it. I like it. What about breathing? Yeah, breathing is good. Definitely. Breathing is good. Yep. I've been a fan for all my life. So that's it. So deep rhythmic breathing into the belly to allow the diaphragm to be able to do the work.

If we breathe fast and shallow, we tend to breathe into our chest and then actually we have to use muscles to do the breathing. And the very oxygen you're getting in by breathing in is a lot of that's going to the muscles to actually do the job. So we often let the movement of our arms and legs dictate our breathing, especially when we're trying to up our cadence. That's one often it can be a challenge to up our cadence because our breathing wants to get faster to go with this increased cadence that we're looking for. So we don't want to completely disassociate the breathing from our movement of our arms and legs because I think it should be a whole thing. But I think what we should try and aim for, and there's no one size that fits all here, but what I think we should try and aim for is to be able to breathe in for three footfalls and breathe it out for three footfalls. That way that's going to slow the breathing down. It's still going to keep it in harmony with the movement because

you want the whole thing to try and be together, the breathing, the movement together. We must get our breathing right because if good running is about relaxation and rhythm in the body, we need that in our breathing. If we're fighting for air, we're not going to move with relaxation and rhythm in our body are we? Yeah, it's an interesting one. Have you found that it's more optimal for people to either end or begin a breath mid-strike or as they strike? Never thought about it. Yeah. Never thought about it.

I wouldn't drill that. I've got to be, this is where you think, are we overthinking this? Does this? It's difficult enough for your listeners to go out tomorrow and try this. It's difficult enough to be able to count three in as your... I'll tell you how to... The thumb and the index finger together as they've got that position. Yeah, I mean, everything with this is so slow

to introduce, I'm gonna guess. Is there a process that you go through? Do you advise people to say, okay, so if you're running over the next X number of sessions, or X number of weeks, we're going to focus on hands and shoulders, then after maybe someone's introduced that for a period of time, then we're going to look at cadence, then we're going to look at breathing, then we're going, you know, trying to add too much in at once, who's going to end up with nothing being done. Have you

got a protocol for how people can introduce things bit by bit? Yeah, definitely. And so one of the big things for everybody to think about here is that if you go out and start changing your movement tomorrow, you are not creating new muscle memory. We talk about muscle memory all the time and we assume that we're teaching a muscle to do a new trick. We're not muscles, don't really remember anything. What we're doing is rewriting our software. We're changing our software, which then tells the muscle what to do. So changing your movement is definitely a cognitive thing, yet you're rewriting this. That's quite exciting because I think it makes it very doable.

We have to understand the challenge to be able to do it. So if you went out for a run, let's say you went out for a five mile run tomorrow, if the first mile you ran beautifully, but the last four were great, then actually you're gonna retain the software of the not great four. The start to change your movement,

the good movement has got to outweigh the not so good movement. So that's the first thing to think about. And so that probably means for some people to go for that little and often approach rather than just long runs. So if you were running 30 miles a week, in three runs, you might want to run 30 miles a week, but in five or six runs. So half the distance and just do it twice as often. Because you're focusing more on the biomechanics, yeah, okay.

Exactly. And are you doing, would you say, one, do you partition off what you're focusing on? You know, for this period of time, we're focusing on one thing. Yeah, so I think the first thing to really, you know, that that foot being the interface between you and the ground, it's gonna get that interface right, like everything else, if the interface isn't good, everything behind, it doesn't really work. So, to first part of all is to really practice landing that foot well and leaving the ground well and then start to work up the body and, yeah, just pick them. It's interesting,

it all sounds like even the stuff we're talking I think well I've got to go out, I can't think about all of those things. Yeah, the first time you jump in a car, you have to think about the clutch and the gears and the indicator and steering anything, I can't do it, I can't do it. It's not long before you can do all of that and chat and you know. So what's sensory overload at first, actually, you get very good at building those motor skills. But yeah, in the early stages, little often pick something work on it. When you feel you've got it, have another skill to it.

How is it that we've got through an entire conversation about people being good at running? And we haven't spoken about lactate threshold or VO2 max or HRV or any of that stuff? Well, I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, we've done well. I've got a research project going on with the University of East London at the moment. And that research project is 20 sensors that go all over the body.

This is running outside, nothing on a trigger. I always work outside, I think that's another reason for the Indiana Jones things. It's only ever research, coach, analyse outside. I think that's another reason why the Indiana Jones thinks it's only having research, coach, analyze outside. So we've got the 20 cents to go all over the body that create 3D models of people running outside, but we're also collecting mobile gases as well, so CO2 levels, oxygen levels. And what we're seeing even now in the early stages is that our running economy can be better by up to 30% just by changing the way that you move. Now you'd have to work pretty hard to get your VO2 max up just a little bit or you'll lactate, threshold up a little bit, 30% and that's actually on practice. That's when they're not good at it,

they go away and practice. So the games are huge and when the athletes used to come over to Europe to race, they would come through Heathrow and they would kind of gather them up, take them to the university and they would get them on sort of treadmills and they'd be putting all sorts of stuff on them and looking at their lactate thresholds, VO2, Maxis and they were always fantastic. But what was always off the scale was their economy. Yeah, the economy of movement is good to build a big engine, but if you can build a big engine and take the toll of what that engine's got to do down by using elastic energy, by using gravity, by using other things other than thirsty muscles, you don't need such

a massive engine. I love it. Shane Benzzi, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep them to date with what you do, where should they go? So it's running reborn. So running reborn.com, you'll find me there and everything that I do and everything I'm getting up to will be there. Yeah, I'd be great to see. Offends, get away, get offends