5 Simple Tips to improve your Running

5 Simple Tips to Improve Your Running

1. Leg turn over. Spin to win, you use a lot less energy turning over short steps quickly then taking longer slower strides. It may make you puff more but there is infinite air for you to inhale, but your muscles will tire, and you make them work harder by taking longer strides. Keep strides small, like your legs are going around on the peddles of a bike.

2. Relaxed shoulders, feel your shoulder blades retract down your back, and lift your sternum or chest to the sky, this gives you better posture, allows you to breath better, and take the tension out or our shoulders and neck.

3. Arm swing, when you run you want your arms tracking forward and back, rather than swinging across in front of you, what tends to swing the body off balance. I recommend the thumbs up technique, simple close your fists and do a thumbs up in each hand, as you run try to consciously keep your thumbs up towards the sky. By doing this it will dramatically reduce the cross body swing.

4. Breathing, the secret weapon to running better, it relaxes you, helps recover your muscles, helps you think clearer, trust me it make a huge difference. A lot of people hate hearing themselves breath and struggle to breath correctly deeply, breath in through your nose, and put your hand on your stomach, and you will feel your stomach rise, this is proper breathing, when you breathe through your nose, it slows your breathing down, allowing correct amounts of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood, when we puff and pant we tend to be mouth breathing and increasing the carbon dioxide levels in the blood, sabotaging our training

5. Use your butt/ glutes. A lot of us have lazy glutes, they have gone to sleep with the many hours of sitting down we do, now we need to wake them up to propel us a long, they are one of our biggest muscles, so it would be stupid not to use them to their potential. Start doing glut exercises, single leg, and double leg exercises, glute bridges single and double leg, deadlift, squats, pistol squats, jumping lunges and jumping squats for a few suggestions.

Running has skill like any other sport, if you want to run it is worth doing a few run skill sessions to make running easier.