In Running Rewired, Americas leading endurance sports physical therapist and coach shares a program for runners to become stronger, faster, and more durable. Jay Dicharry distills cutting-edge biomechanical research into 15 workouts any runner can slot into their training program to begin seeing real results in about 6 weeks. For better or worse, your body drives your running form.
Running Rewired will show you how to shed old injuries, mobility problems, weaknesses and imbalances and rewire your body-brain movement patterns.
While this book is no substitute for a one-on-one running gait lab examination, there is a pattern to the problems that plague runners. I know that if I can give you the tools to create a more durable body that can resist the stress of running, you can push the boundaries of your own physical performance.
Running versus practicing It obviously takes time and practice to refine your craft. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explains the theory that it takes 10, hours of practice to be the best.
This is a big mistake, particularly when it comes to running. Practicing the same thing over and over again just reinforces your current movement patterns.
Adding more volume of less-than-perfect movement means you get really good at moving poorly. What you practice and how you practice it makes all the difference. To run better we have to realize that running is a skill.
And skilled running stems from practicing skilled movement. Purposeful practice is kind of like running. Your training plan tells you to run, so you run. You keep logging more volume, heartbeats, and mileage in your black box in pursuit of a certain goal, but the target is usually set on a specific time or distance. Instead, you keep turning up the volume, hoping to hear that magic song that inspires you to a new PR. Ericsson describes deliberate practice as doing a specific task with the intent of improving performance.
To get better at running, you must first understand the sport so you can identify the sport-specific skills that are critical to improving. Then, you need a formal plan of attack to develop those skills. With deliberate practice the neurophysiology in your brain will adapt and rewire its strategy for running. We will build your proficiency at these skills, effectively rewiring how your body moves so you can run better.
I know your time is valuable. Maybe you are still unconvinced. Imagine what it would feel like to develop a running gait that is more symmetrical and less stressful. The promise of improved joint health and faster running times is hard to resist. There are no shortcuts to get you there. But if you are ready to invest some hard work and be consistent with your training, this plan will bring you success.
When you know that much, you know how to prepare and what to study. Well, class is in session: What does running test? When you run, each stride tests your body. If we understand the specific problems or challenges that we face as runners we can work backward from there and establish a plan to be better prepared. Your heart beats harder, pumping blood throughout the body.
Sweat drips down your forehead as your body temperature rises. You feel the wind on your face as you turn round the track, up the trail, or down the road. These are the images that running conjures up in our heads and they are real, but while your heart and lungs are driving your engine toward redline, your chassis is under a lot of stress. Like it or not, your body must deal with 2.
Think about this for a minute. If you stand up on both legs, you have half your body weight on each leg. Like it or not, this is how much stress your bones, tendons, muscles, cartilage, and ligaments support with every single stride you take. Well, we just shot that idea into oblivion. If anything, we could say that running is large stresses acting on our body for a long time. Running creates huge amounts of stress that act on the body from all sides with each and every step. No wonder running is hard!
This load acting on your body is absolute and somewhat mechanical. Imagine a rubber ball. If you throw a rubber ball off the roof, it will first accelerate to the ground.
When it collides with the ground, the energy of the impact will flatten the ball out a bit and then the ball will rebound off the ground and spring back up again. This is a simple illustration of how a passive object responds to load.
Now imagine you are soaring through the air in mid-stride and the same gravity that accelerated the rubber ball takes you back to earth. You have joint structures, muscles, and a brain. Alone, these parts can do nothing, and together they can break world records. Joint structures: The mechanical parts of your body are like doors and hinges. Your bones have structure, and each of these bones connects to other bones through a joint.
The joints are lined with cartilage, a cool material that cushions and lubricates the bones as they move, and the bones are connected by ligaments, which tie one bone to the other.
All of these support parts are important, but they are just passive pulleys and levers. Muscles: This is where the work gets done. To get the door to open on its hinge requires a force to open or close it. Muscles provide this force generation for our body. They allow one joint to move on another or stabilize a joint while motion occurs somewhere else. This is where your brain comes in. Think of it as a computer that is wired to a network of muscles.
It modulates the force we create. This amount of control allows us not just to move, but to move with precision. With each and every stride, these systems all talk to each other.
The mechanical load accelerating you down to earth stimulates a chain of events. They send signals out to your neuromuscular system, calling for action. Your brain triggers the muscles to generate a certain amount of force at just the right time.
Your muscles get this message and do the work they were told. They pull on the joints to create motion. The joints relay information to your brain since the amount of muscle force they need changes as they arc through their range of motion. This cross talk is essentially a system of checks and balances to make sure things are going well.
If done correctly, your body produces a net mechanical force that is just enough to counter the mechanical load trying to squash you down like a pancake. If all goes well, you just took one single stride. Nice job. Each element in the system has specific inputs and outputs to modify the quality of your stride. Runners have an unrelenting focus on volume. More miles per week obviously puts more mechanical load on your joints.
A poor movement program equates to poor body control. When the body becomes overwhelmed by the demands of running it sets us up for injury or leads to compromised performance. Specifically, it is how we deal with the mechanical demands of running that dictates how well we perform. The two big questions are: 1. Is your movement safe? What type of movement skill and body awareness do you bring to running? Is your movement efficient? Could you rewire the way you move to drive you forward with less effort and less form breakdown during your runs?
An efficient movement program improves the quality of your stride for long- term joint health and efficiency. Just as we can adjust the quantity of our running volume, we can learn to improve the quality of our running volume.
Your brain learns through movement and awareness to know when, how much, and how fast to drive your legs. You can improve your skills by better understanding the input your brain is receiving and rewiring your movement program to get your legs moving more safely and efficiently.
Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Do you know how you learned to swim? Do you know how the brain recovers after a stroke? The answers to these questions have one thing in common: neural plasticity. Your brain is capable of learning. Not just rote memorization, but actually learning how to do new things at any age! When you learn, your brain makes new connections from one cell to another. The more you practice, the more robust these connections become.
Your nerves are literally building skill by laying down connectivity from nerve to nerve. The wires that connect your systems are dynamic.
They adjust their signals depending on your needs. Changing pace requires modifications as well. Your nervous system makes all of the necessary adjustments behind the scenes.
The same thing happens when you get a new pair of shoes—your body makes slight changes to account for the new environment your foot now sits on. All of this learning that your body does to account for these differences is evidence that it can also learn and adapt to run better.
The Running Rewired program uses neural plasticity to train your body to run with more control for better durability and better performance. Moving with precision and force A lot of coaches will tell you that runners self-select their own efficient running form. Well, kind of. Most runners figure out how to compensate for any shortcomings in their current make-up of mobility, stability, strength, and power.
You refine and practice Plan B over years of purposeful practice. Plan B can certainly get the job done to log your miles. Movements that feel awkward today can become instinctual. Through deliberate practice, Plan A can also become instinctual. Settle for Plan B and you will leave performance on the table because Plan B stops short of harnessing your durability or capacity.
Neither would soccer, basketball, or ice hockey. Placing a huge load on top of existing problems only makes things worse. Your injury cycles demand rest time that prevents consistent training. Break the cycle. In fact, research shows that people who drive more force down to the ground in a shorter period of time run faster.
Every runner, at every level, can train and improve this skill. We are going to open up the black box of running and establish a system for making you a better runner. Your body drives your running form. Build a better body and you will improve your running form. By focusing on the specific skills that improve running, you can move with precision and strengthen your spring.
To move with precision you need enough mobility to move unencumbered and enough stability to control the path your body takes over each mile. Moving better makes you more durable as a runner, which allows your training to be more consistent. A stronger spring leads to better performance because your ability to deliver more oomph down to the ground makes for a faster stride.
The Running Rewired Workouts act as a step- by-step program to change your body and evolve your running. You are talking to Wes about the vacation you are planning, but all he wants to talk about is the fact that his right IT iliotibial band is killing him. You fade back to take a look at his stride and notice that his right knee is collapsing inward. You tell Wes to steer his leg straight.
But Wes has no idea how to correct this problem. So he overcompensates by forcing his knees outward. Most people would think that this is due to muscle weakness, and that is a possibility.
Personal trainers often make the claim that heavy squats fix everything. Your body is the problem. To plug the muscle back in, we need to teach it to work and coordinate it with the rest of the body.
Recently a runner came to see me with hip pain. Her coach and friends had told her to strengthen her glutes, so she began going to a Butts and Guts class every week. What was the net impact after two years? Nothing—she saw zero improvement. And none of the time she invested had helped her running stride. We took a step back and cleaned up her movement problems. Within three weeks she was symptom-free and set a PR in the half-marathon.
When she returned to those classes, she had better movement and she could see the results. When you move correctly, you move at your best.
And most importantly, your body learns skills that improve your running. With each stride, brain and body deliver an optimal stride. Runners look to the elites for advice on how to improve their own form. For best results, we have to practice quality movement, but the quality of your correct movement is only as good as your body allows it to be. Case in point: Our friend Wes would like to clean up his gait. He sits on planes for more hours at a stretch than some people sleep at night, and then he sits more in meetings all day.
Sitting can corrupt posture, effectively shutting off or inhibiting the core and hip muscles. Also, Wes has an old injury that makes his right ankle joint stiff.
The tightness in his hips prevents him from getting a good push-off so his leg swings farther in front of his body and less behind.
And the stiffness in his right ankle shifts him to the outside of his foot with each and every step, which imparts yet more wobble to the path of his leg swinging through space. Wes wants to improve his control while running. Wes has adapted to his problems by jerry- rigging his gait. Wes is not the only one—evolution has programmed us to figure out the most energy-efficient way to walk and run.
The body gets good at what it practices, and with each run, Wes continued to engrain a compensated gait thanks to his stiff ankle and unplugged hips. And then one day, Wes sought some help from his friend at the gym. You can have better mobility, but your body has to know how to use it. What happened? You read a command. Your brain agreed. It sent a message to the muscles in your arm to lift your hand, bring it to your face, precisely find the location on your face where the nose is, and wiggle the fingers to create movement and scratch.
All of this occurred through something called voluntary movement. You made a conscious decision to move and your brain carried out the task.
Now, get up, walk to the end of the room, and then back. Once again, your brain made a voluntary decision to give this a try. You got up and started to walk. But after that, things went very differently. With each step you flexed your hip up, extended the knee, swung the lower leg through, let a foot fall to the floor, rolled through the ankle, pushed through the calf to propel the body, and then repeated. Gait is not voluntary, but rather reflexive.
Reflexive movements occur without conscious thought. In fact, the signals that bounce around your body telling you to crawl, walk, and run are carried out by a special program called your central pattern generators, or CPGs. The CPGs learn from all the practice you do in a repetitive movement like gait, and practice builds connectivity. Sure, it is possible to overpower this reflex. If you want, you can push off harder on your left leg versus your right, but this would require brainpower because you would be modifying the normal reflexive pattern of gait sent out via the CPGs in your spinal cord.
This is why changing running form can be hard. Trying to hit perfect form with your less-than-perfect body results in you fighting your own movement. If you have ever tried to change your cadence, you know this firsthand.
Running along at steps per minute for eight years and then trying to hit steps per minute will require huge effort on the part of your brain. The same goes for posture. Still, there are plenty of running coaches out there telling people to shorten their contact time on the ground to run faster. This advice started with an experiment with a group of the best runners in the United States. They were told to shorten their contact time during all their runs, but this required completely reorganizing how hard they pushed down on each and every stride.
It was a total disaster that resulted in every single runner being injured. Reducing contact time will make you faster, but your body has to be trained how to do this properly before you can expect it to integrate and improve your gait. You can make changes in your running form, but good form is not going to happen in one session with one cue.
Your body needs to build a database of proper muscle memory. Neural Plasticity Many years ago, I experienced a severe head injury that put me in a coma for a while. The swelling shifted parts of my brain that are normally on the top of the skull to be down below it, and my spinal cord was compressed. The trauma my brain and spinal cord sustained made it impossible for me to maintain balance and coordination. I remember having to think about walking in a way I never did before my injury.
Since the normal reflexive message coming out of my spinal cord was damaged, voluntary commands from my brain were required. And I practiced walking. Eventually my brain and the CPGs in my spinal cord got together and wrote a new program.
My brain went back to thinking about other stuff, gait became automatic and reflexive again, and I could walk straight on the sidewalk. For most of us, the mental concentration needed to engage in a new movement ranks around 7 on a scale of 1 to This is the cognitive stage of improving movement.
During this stage, movement is not smooth and requires lots of brainpower. Two weeks of exercises later, Wes was moving his hip more smoothly—he had laid down a few new wires. It was time to incorporate some of the movements he had practiced to become more of a full-body movement. Now when Wes is cued to steer his hips straight, he does it correctly.
Instead of turning his knees out so his weight is on the outside of his foot, he maintains a strong, planted foot and moves properly from the hips. Wes feels that this movement is more correct, but it still takes some extra thought and requires a bit more work to run this way. His Plan B still feels normal, and Plan A feels forced.
Remember, running is reflexive. For Wes to modify his form, he has to coordinate extra input from the brain into his normal gait pattern to control his body position while running. This is now called the associative phase of improving movement. Wes can move properly on command, but the movement is not quite fully rewired. A month into practicing the movement, Wes finds the exercise easy—almost automatic. And it shows. This is the autonomous phase.
His muscles are firing, and Wes has learned to coordinate this movement into his gait. His hip alignment when running is symmetrical. He is extending his hips correctly and his pain is completely gone. We fixed a neuromuscular problem through neuromuscular training. Wes was running in pain with visible issues with his running form. The collapse of his leg was creating shear on the outside of the knee, which made his IT band angry.
But what was the underlying problem that caused his leg to collapse? So what happened? Moving with precision requires coordinated movement—both intra- and intermuscular coordination. Intramuscular coordination is how a muscle talks to itself. A muscle is made up of lots of fibers that shorten together to produce a muscle contraction that creates movement. When the muscle is inhibited, or unplugged, not enough of these fibers get the signal to engage. To fix this, it takes very specific, even sometimes isolated, movements, to train the fibers within the muscle to talk to each other for more uniform contraction.
This type of training targets muscle intelligence. Intermuscular coordination is how muscles talk to each other. This type of training targets system intelligence. Research shows that neuromuscular training delivers excellent results—reducing your risk of injury and improving coordination, speed, agility, vertical jump, and contact times. This work is complementary to your running. Crosstraining describes the work runners do to keep their hearts and lungs in shape in the absence of running volume.
Complementary training refines your skills and makes you a better runner. When we say muscles are unplugged, we mean they are unplugged from your default reflexive movement. This is why we focus on building coordination both within and between muscles.
Through practice, neural plasticity allows us to plug these precision movements into our CPGs and convert them to autopilot for precision running form. Coordination, control, and precision are all skills that every runner needs to practice. These movements require high volume and little resistance. These skills should be practiced a couple of times every week, all season long, to ensure that the movement skill can be put to use while running. You need to own the movement. Not just in an exercise or drill, not just at mile 1, not just at mile 5.
But at every repeat of your track workout, every hill effort, and every mile of your race. The end goal is to make that refined movement awareness reflexive.
After sitting in class all day, our track team bounded onto the field about 5 minutes ago. To get the team moving we began with a warm-up. What we are looking for is essentially an up-and-down motion, where the ankles and knees track forward and the hips track back. The lack of motion in their ankles is causing them to cheat somewhere else.
In an effort to keep their weight over their feet, each athlete shifts backward and the spine rounds into a slump at the bottom of the squat.
We conclude that the stiff ankles are limiting their form and decide to send the four athletes over to the wall for a second calf stretch to get their ankles moving. When they are finished, we watch them squat again.
Eva is now squatting with perfect form. Buy a discounted Paperback of Running Rewired online from Australia's leading online bookstore. Showing all Sort by price: high to low; Add to cart.
Trailhead The Dirt on All Things Your browser indicates if you've visited this linkThe Hip Circuit workout is one of one precision workouts in Jay Dicharry's new book,.
Precision workouts are designed to cue smooth movements and build better muscle memory. Your browser indicates if you've visited this link eBook: Dicharry Jay: co. Your browser indicates if you've visited this linkRunning Rewired has 0 ratings and 0 reviews.
In Running Rewired, America's leading endurance sports physical therapist and coach shares a program for run The Running Rewired Your browser indicates if you've visited this linkPris: ,-. Midlertidig utsolgt. Fri frakt fra kr. When you run, especially as your speed increases, Running Rewired.
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