WHAT IS RUNNING GAIT?
Are you a weekend warrior that hits the road every Saturday for your distance run? Did you recently just start taking your casual jog a bit more seriously? Either way you have probably started to hear more about your ‘running gait’. But what actually does running gait mean and how does this affect your current workout and training routine?
Running gait is simply the mechanical process of a leg traveling during one step. For our purposes you can think of it almost as one’s running form. By improving your running gait, you can increase efficiency (more speed with less energy) and decrease injury risk.
Now let’s take a minute to visualize this. Imagine yourself running. Your right foot hits the ground, which initiates what is commonly referred to as the stance phase. As soon as it hits the ground the runner slows down- even if only for the briefest of moments during the braking phase of the gait cycle. Then you use that same foot to propel yourself forward during the propulsion phase. Once that foot leaves the ground you are controlled by gravity until the opposite leg hits the ground and initiates a new stance phase. The recovering leg is now in the swing phase (think of how the leg swings forward).
Use the image above as an example. You can see the athlete’s heel strike (also known as initial contact). The athlete is absorbing force and slowing themselves down until the moment their center of gravity is over their foot (identified by the red circle in the image above). At this point, the athlete is able to use their foot’s ground contact to propel themselves forward.
Running Gait and Running Efficiency
When we are running, the best use of energy is to generate forward force. However, there are other directions that your body can, and ultimately does go.
In the image here, the blue circle represents the center of mass of the individual. The red circles represent the center of mass’s potential movement pattern during a run.
- There is vertical movement, sometimes called vertical oscillation. If you’ve ever heard someone saying that they have a bouncy or bounding running form, it is because their gait cycle has a lot of vertical movement.
- There is lateral movement, sometimes called sway. This is movement left to right.
- And there is horizontal movement, or forward and backward movement.
In its most fundamental form, the goal of running is to travel a specific horizontal distance in the shortest amount of time (with the least amount of effort). From what we’ve covered above, we know that vertical movement is not forward movement. We know that lateral movement is not forward movement. And last, we know that when a runner’s foot first makes contact with the ground, the runner is slowing themselves down. Any muscular effort that goes into creating movement laterally or vertically, in addition to muscular effort expended slowing your body down is by definition is inefficient.
STRIVE
How does STRIVE play a part in your running gait? STRIVE contains a device called an accelerometer. Simply put, It measures accelerations. Remember back in physics class? Force = mass x acceleration. We know muscular energy is required to create force. Force is what moves you (or the runner). Therefore, if we reduce acceleration in the vertical plane (reduce bouncing) and reduce acceleration in lateral plane (reduce sway, side-to-side), we will decrease the amount of locomotive energy being used.
STRIVE measures these accelerations and currently labels them as “External Load” (in the Pro App) and “Action” (in the Elite App). Let’s say that two runners ran an 8.5 mile loop together at an 8 minute pace. They begin together at 6:18 pm and they finish together at 7:26 pm. If both runners are wearing STRIVE and one, Runner A, has an External Load or Action Score of 900 and the other, Runner B, has an External Load or Action Score of 800, what does that mean?
This means that even though the two runners ran the same distance at the same speed, the runner with the higher External Load or Action Score had more sporadic movement! STRIVE’s new gait analysis feature will be able to break out how much of that movement was vertical movement, how much of it was lateral movement, and how much of that movement was the runner braking themselves. After a run, the athlete can look at their metrics in order to improve their efficiency on their next run, by focusing on reducing all movement that is not in the forward direction!
