The Most Effective Way to Improve Your Running Form

If you want to become a more efficient runner, it's important to work on your running form, right? Maybe. Because as run coach Matt Fitzgerald argues, running form should be dictated by the body just as much as it is by a coach.

A significant fraction of the runners who come to me for coaching want help with their form. The underlying assumption they share is that becoming a more efficient runner requires them to alter their natural stride in accordance with an expert’s instruction. It’s an understandable assumption. After all, that’s how golfers improve their swing and how swimmers improve their freestyle technique. But the bulk of scientific evidence suggests that conscious efforts to alter one’s natural running form are not an effective way to run better.

The science of running form

A recent review of thirty-seven past studies investigating the effects of increasing runners’ stride rate—a common approach to improving running form—found that “increasing step rate increases perceived exertion and awkwardness and effort” and also that “an increase in preferred step rate is associated with increased metabolic energy consumption.” In other words, this supposed form fix makes running harder—at least in the short term—with zero evidence that anything changes in the long term.

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Findings like these are quite surprising to runners who are aware that, at a population level, higher stride rates are associated with greater running economy and better performance. Why, then, do running economy and performance not improve when an individual runner consciously chooses to increase their stride rate or alters their form in some other way (such as switching from heel to midfoot striking) that makes it more like that of faster runners?

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The key to a better running economy

The answer is that the true key to greater running economy and better performance is automaticity, or the ability to run with minimal mental effort. When runners force themselves to run in a way that isn’t natural for them, their mental effort increases, causing them to feel more strain even though their form might now look better to an observer. In all motor skills, not just running, the essence of a proficient technique is a quiet mind that can drive efficient movement patterns with minimal neural activation. And you don’t get a quiet mind by willing it, according to science. You get it by simply running, allowing your neuromuscular system to learn from each stride without conscious interference.

In a 2012 study, for example, Sharon Dixon of the University of Exeter in England measured changes in running economy in a group of new runners. For 10 weeks, these runners trained on their own without any technique instruction. Despite making no conscious effort to improve their form, they achieved an average improvement of 8.4 percent in running economy, an improvement that Dixon found to be related to subtle changes in biomechanics that no runner could ever execute consciously.

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Stride rate was not among the variables tracked in this study, but real-world evidence suggests that it, too, self-optimizes over time. An example is Roberto Veneziani, an Italian runner who tracked his stride rate and race performance (measured in IAAF point values) for a full season. Note that Roberto made no conscious effort to increase his stride rate, yet as you can see in the graph below, his stride rate increased naturally as he got fitter, and as he got fitter his performance improved.

It doesn’t take a full season for these types of adaptations to occur. In fact, they can and do occur within a single run. This was shown in a 2007 study by Iain Hunter and Gerald Smith of Brigham Young University, who measured stride rate in runners completing an exhaustive one-hour treadmill run. As the runners fatigued, their stride rate decreased, which sounds like a bad thing. But when Hunter and Smith had the runners maintain their initial stride rate throughout a second time trial, their economy was negatively impacted. So it appears that the unconscious change in stride rate exhibited by the runners in the first time trial was the neuromuscular system’s way of preserving efficiency despite fatigue.

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The importance of self-optimization

The problem with most so-called running form experts is that they think they’re smarter than the neuromuscular system, which operates mostly beneath the level of consciousness. But in fact the neuromuscular system is much smarter than any biomechanist. The simple fact is that the only guaranteed way to become a more efficient runner is to get out of the way and allow your stride to naturally self-optimize.

The one exception I make to this guidance is injury prevention. There is good scientific evidence that certain targeted technique changes can reduce the risk of injury recurrence in runners. A recent study appearing in the journal PLoS One, for example, found that runners with knee pain who were trained either to increase their cadence or to land more softly reported less knee pain and better knee function six months later.

Running is not golf, or swimming, or any other motor skill that requires systematic technique development to optimize performance. The most effective way to improve your running form is to run.