Chi Running - revisited

Sunday I attended the Chi Running Workshop. What a great class! They had about 20 people and they held it at a Tai Chi school in Ann Arbor. Danny Dreyer is a really nice guy and a good instructor so it was easy to take instructions from him.

Its kinda tough to go through all of Chi Running again, but let me note the three big key points we learned:

1. Posture.

This is the first part we learned. The trick is to line up you shoulders, hips, and ankles in a straight line. At the same time, you need to have your pelvis leveled, so that the front does not tip down, which is typical for most folks when they stand. Standing will all the right alignment uses your structure to support your weight and not so much of your muscles. We did a small exercies where we stood both normally and with the proper alignment while a partners pressed down on our shoulders. What a difference! It took no effort from my muscles to resist the force when my alignment was straight.

The point of this is that when you run, your body is fighting gravity, which wants to compress it. By using the strong structure of you bones to support the weight, and less muscles, you conserve energy, which is what you want for endurance running. Posture.

2. Relax you lower legs.

This was hard to grasp at first. Relax? How do I push off? You don’t. You’ll see. Your lower legs are some of the weakest muscles in your body. Yet, when we run, we often use them to push ourselves forward or to absorb the impact of the step, which leads to fatigue and overuse injuries. He said we want to use core muscles and the strong upper leg muscles. They can take the force. The tiny little shin muscles can’t and they tear right off the bone when we get shin splints. Yes. Ow.

3. Lean

This goes hand in hand with relaxing the lower legs. If we aren’t using our lower legs, then we need a way to move forward. He’s the exercise to demonstrate, stand facing a wall (with the correct alignment), about one foot length away. Allow your calves and ankles to relax completely. What happens? You smash your face into the wall! Yes, your calves keep you upright, so if you relax them, you fall forward.

Now, stand in the middle of the room (after the nosebleed stops) and do the same relaxing trick with your calves. What happens? You fall forward, but this time, your reflexes kick in and your foot jumps out and you take a step. Hey! I get it. If I lean and let myself fall, I take a step, and if I keep doing that, I keep moving forward, while GRAVITY pulls me forward. Lower legs don’t need to do all the work anymore.

When you step forward though, you keep your alignment of shoulder-hi-ankle, so that you step lands beneith you, not in front which can cause a heel strike. You want to land on midfoot. He showed how you can always spot a heel-strike runner because you can see the bottoms of their shoes as they run towards you. The only time they should see your soles is from behind as you pull away from them in a race. :)

After the exercises inside, we went out to the parking lot to do the running portion. Since it was Sunday and this was a business complex, there were no cars and the lots was empty so it worked out great. Although there were houses behind the lot and they probably had a real laugh at the wierd stuff we did.

He had us practicing just jogging in place with out hands to our sides, to practice the feel of bending our knees without lifting the knees up. Exaggerated movements to help you feel it. Must have looked funny to the spectators. Then we ran forward like that. Even funnier. Then to show us how our pelvis swivels back and forth while running, he had us run with our arms out like airplanes (your upper body can’t swivel, just the pelvis is the wings stay straight). Now, I’m sure the spectators had the video cameras out.

After alot of piece-by-piece steps to get us there, eventually we had the full form and were practicing the running part. It felt pretty good and you can see how running this way conserves alot of energy. The step itself is a small circular motion and your cadence stays the same regardless of speed, but your lean increases as does your stride length to speed up. We even did running while he used a metronome so that we could try running different speeds with the same cadence (80 left for steps/minute). I may buy one just to try practicing it.

He videotaped us all running and then we analyzed the form to see how we were doing. I did alot better than I thought I was going to do. I had good alignment and good lean, which was key. One thing to correct was to make sure I didn’t drop my hands, to keep them near my ribs when I swing the arm. We did alot of work on arm swinging. Swing from the shoulder like a pendulum, but don’t swing the shoulder itself. Keeping your elbow at a right angle gives you the right swing speed to match your legs.

An interesting note by Danny was that if you drop your arm too low, your ankle does not come up high enough, and he pointed that out in my video. He said you want your ankle to come up high enough that the shin is parallel to the ground. This may seem like a waste of movement but your leg is the counterbalance to your arm and body leaning forward. Without the cuonterbalance, you muscles must again work to keep you upright.

Oh, yeah, he also mention POSE running. He said that it does make you faster, but you have to build muscles to do it. He said it promotes running on the ball of your foot, which while make your calves do the work. Chi Running uses gravity and less muscle to achieve the same thing. Can’t wait to hear Mark and Aaron’s reports. ;)

Danny also mentioned barefoot running and talked about how there is no way you could run barefoot and be a heal striker for very long. But you can run easily with Chi Running barefoot. He talked for quite a bit about the same things the barefoot running folks say about cushioned shoes and how they don’t help your feet and actually make you more dependent on them. By working on the right running form, you will find that you need less and less cushioning and support as your feet and legs learn to run safely. Ultimately, you may only need a pair of racing flats.

He said, don’t go out tomorrow and try to run your next race Chi Running style in racing flats, because as soon as you get tired, you will go back to your old form anyway and your feet will be darn sore. Do it bit by bit. Small steps to build up to a consistent form change.

Overall, it was a great class. Going and doing the practice right there made it all so clear to me. Reading the book was one thing, but going and doing it will people was so much better. Definately worth the money.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2005 at 11:46 am and is filed under Running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.