There seems to be much debate in the running community today on what is the best footstrike for running. Runners of all levels divide themselves into three basic camps: the midfoot strikers, the forefoot strikers and the heel strikers. So, here is my attempt to put forward my best understanding of the three basic types of foot strike and what each one does for a runner.

The Midfoot Strike
The midfoot strike is characterized as having your heel and the ball of your foot touching the ground simultaneously with each foot strike. You can see this very clearly when you watch young children run. They always land with their whole foot on the ground. I would say that at least 95% of all people run this way as kids.

In the ChiRunning technique, we promote the midfoot strike because it is, for most runners, the most injury-preventive way to run. Our emphasis is on preventing the lower legs (including the knees) from over-working, because this area of the body is where, conservatively speaking, 90% of all running injuries occur. Plantar fasciitis, achilles tendonitis, shin splints, calf pulls, knee pain, IT band problems, over-pronation, bunions, metatarsal and tibial stress fractures, and hammer toes lead the list of the most common running injuries. This list is immense compared to everything that can go wrong above the knees.

The propulsion in ChiRunning comes from allowing your body to fall forward with the pull of gravity, not from pushing yourself forward with your feet and legs. For this reason it is more energy-efficient because your legs are not required for propulsion. When your feet come down onto the ground, they land either under or slightly behind your center of mass, in a midfoot strike. The only work required of your legs is to provide momentary support for your body between strides. Landing on your midfoot, in most cases, either reduces or eliminates the work done by A.) the lower leg muscles…especially the shins and calves, and B.) the two tendons that are most commonly injured… the plantar tendon and the achilles tendon.

The ChiRunning technique is primarily focused on energy efficiency and injury-prevention with speed being a secondary focus.

The Forefoot Strike
The forefoot is basically the part of the foot between the forward-most part of the arch and the end of the toes… generally speaking, the balls of the feet. If your heels don’t touch the ground when you run, you’re a forefoot striker.

Sprinters, middle-distance runners, and some triathletes tend to prefer running on the forefoot because of the extra speed obtained by “paw-back” and “toeing off.” This way of running is great if you want lots of speed, but it puts the responsibility for most of the body’s propulsion squarely onto the legs…especially the lower legs. Some of the faster elite middle-distance runners (i.e. Kenyans, Moroccans, Ethiopians, Mexicans) run with a forward lean added in combination with a forefoot strike. This takes some but not all of the burden off the lower legs.

Because forefoot running is primarily used for running at faster speeds, energy efficiency tends to take a distant back seat. As far as being injury-preventive, forefoot striking helps prevent knee injuries because it lowers the impact to the knees. This is a good thing. But the problem with it is that running on the balls of your feet increases the workload on your calves, shins, achilles tendons, and plantar tendons, so you risk either overworking a muscle or pulling a tendon if you go too far or too fast while running on your forefeet.

The Heel Strike
Heel striking is when your heel strikes the ground in front of your body. At least 75% of all runners run with a heel strike. The interesting thing about this fact is that, although it is by far the most common of all the footstrike patterns, it is not done by choice, but by default. The vast majority of all runners are not elite runners or competitors, they’re just regular folks like you and me, who like to run and like to stay fit.

Most recreational runners tend to run with their body in an upright position… with no lean at all. This forces them to have to reach forward with their legs when they run…and when you run upright and reach with your legs, your feet will always land in front of your body and your heels will come down first. When you run this way, you’re basically putting on the brakes with each stride, which sends a lot of impact to your lower legs and knees. For this reason, many heel strikers complain of knee pain at some point in their running career. This is the group that keeps orthopedists and physical therapists in business.

But, just because you might be a heel striker, it doesn’t mean you’re doomed to be a heel striker for the rest of your life. Work on improving your running technique. If you can learn to run safely and efficiently, you’ll be eliminating the causes of running injuries and you won’t have to worry about ending up in a doctor’s office getting fixed.

The midfoot strike works for most runners…the forefoot strike works for some runners…but, the heel strike doesn’t seem to work well for anybody. Try all three and see which one works the best for you.

With the ChiRunning book, DVD or audio CD you can easily learn the midfoot strike. We offer you an alternative way to approach your running so that you can learn the midfoot strike and spend many more years enjoying one of the world’s best and most natural sports.

Happy trails,

Danny

I want to give a gracious thank you to all who have commented on my blog. Your kinds words and interest are greatly appreciated. Recently, I’ve noticed that questions are being posted on the blog. Regretfully, I am not able to address these questions. Our bulletin board is a wonderful resource for many of your inquiries and if you’re not able to find your answer already, you can certainly ask the expert while you’re there. I apologize for not answering each question but I trust the bulletin board will provide you with assistance. Thanks for all your support!

Stay centered,
Danny

We’ve all heard the old saying, “It takes money to make money.” Well, here’s my latest take on that. I was out running yesterday, having an ok run, but not feeling particularly energetic. I’m sure you’ve been there. I was running my favorite out and back trail run with my dog. It’s quite a hilly trail with virtually no flat spots anywhere.

It has an uphill start (which I never recommend) so I started off walking to warm up my legs before taking on the first incline. Once I began running on the trail I walked some of the steeper uphills in order to not over-use my legs early on in the run. This has always worked well for me in the past. Once my legs were warmed up they began to feel much more comfortable on the up hills. I ran to my turnaround point and began my return trip, as I usually do. But on the way back, my legs were beginning to feel exhausted running some of the last hills, even though I was shortening my stride considerably and slowing my pace. I felt as though someone had pulled the plug on my energy. I was body sensing and my legs were telling me that they were tired.

One of the interesting things about the Chi skill of Body Sensing that is explained in the ChiRunning and ChiWalking books is that as you watch and listen to your body, it is important to be as non-identified and impartial as possible. So, here I am, running along and saying to myself, “This is just a sensation.” I intuitively knew that my legs weren’t really tired, because I had done this same run only a couple of days earlier and had a great run. So, then I asked myself, “What can I do about this?” I was on an uphill section, so I shortened my stride, relaxed my legs and began swinging my arms forward and upward wildly, creating a huge range of motion. When I crested the top of the short rise I kept swinging my arms as I had been and leaned into the subsequent downhill slope. I did everything I could to lengthen my stride, rotate my pelvis and bend my knees. I must have looked like a crazy-man. I kept this up for about a minute or two and then relaxed my whole body. What I noticed after doing this, was that my whole body felt much lighter and energized. I had no problems with fatigue for the rest of the run. In fact, I ran smoother and faster than usual.

After my run, I realized that if I hadn’t chosen to swing my arms and focused on getting my energy moving, it wouldn’t have changed over and I might have finished my run feeling tired and worn out. As it turned out, I felt very energetic afterwards. And that’s when the phrase, “It takes money to make money.” popped into my head.

Whenever you feel you have a lack of energy, it could mean that your energy (chi) just isn’t flowing and you need to do something to “wake it up.” Doing something physical is always best, and don’t always think that just because you’re tired, that you have no energy available. It’s there, but you have to consciously “jump start” it to get it moving. This technique can, of course, be applied just as effectively to situations in everyday life. Try it…you might like it.

Keep the chi flowing,
Danny

Whenever I’ve been asked to be interviewed by the media, I’ve been asked this question…and then been given about 45 seconds to answer. So I challenged myself to come up with a brief description of how ChiRunning and ChiWalking combine the principles of t’ai chi with running and walking, and how that can improve your movement. So here goes… (I’m starting my stopwatch.)

“T’ai chi is the mother of all martial arts, based on the premise that all movement and power originates from your center, not your arms and legs.
For centuries, the Chinese have studied animal movement and found that all movement in the body revolves around a central axis (along the spine) while the arms and legs remain as relaxed as possible and act only as conduits for the force generated by your core.

When these principles of alignment and relaxation are applied in ChiRunning and ChiWalking, efficiency increases and impact with the ground decreases. You can run farther, faster or more often without increasing your risk of injury. Your body no longer breaks down because you’re practicing to run and walk with more fluidity with every step, while using the pull of gravity for propulsion.”

There… 41 seconds flat.

Have a great day,
Danny

Being able to walk or run injury-free doesn’t happen by accident… and believe it or not, neither do most injuries. Although there are many people out there who are naturally talented in running and walking, there are very few people who never get injured. Even the best fall prey to training mistakes or momentary lapses in their technique. We’re all human and therefore subject to everything that entails, which means we spend our lives dealing with the consequences of our choices whether they’re made consciously or unconsciously.

Making the choice to live a life of injury-free running or walking involves making efforts to observe what you’re doing so you can lower the odds of being sidelined for any reason. You can choose to be injury-free by doing everything in your power to run or walk in a way that won’t hurt your body.

This choice applies to injury-prevention as well as injury-recovery. Whether you’re intent on avoiding injury or whether you want to recover from an injury, make the choice to run and walk as efficiently and as biomechanically correct as possible and you’ll carry with you the best health insurance policy there is…for the rest of your life.

The choice to be injury-free begins with self-observation. Listen to your body. Do you “hear” complaints from any body parts, in terms of aches or pain? Whenever you do, ask yourself the simple question, “Why is this happening?” Many possible answers will come, but keep asking that question until you discover the true source of the problem. Many times injuries are layered and the primal cause is not clear at first. But if you keep asking your question at each successive layer, you’ll eventually get to the origin. And when you do, you stand in the unique position of being able to choose to rid yourself of the problem forever by addressing the real cause.

When you feel that you’re onto the answer to your question, you can either refer back to the ChiWalking book or the ChiRunning book, or go to the library of articles on our website to see which focuses you can apply to correcting the problem.

Here’s where choice comes in. Once you know what it is you need to do, make a choice to instate the corrective focus(es) with every step you take until the problem goes away. Your ability to move forward into health lies in your ability to be relentlessly mindful in your movement. This is the true nature of mind-body work. Making the choice for health requires constant focus… but think of the alternatives.

Namaste,
Danny

Here are a couple of tips for runners and walkers from Mary Lindahl, one of our master instructors who lives in Seattle. She was with us on our recent trip to China and came home with these pearls of wisdom, I’ve added my own notes in italics. These are great tips. The walking one is for anyone interested in making their own walking easier and more efficient. That means you runners need to read it too…it’ll help reduce effort in your leg swing. -Danny

ChiRunning Tip – Your Body Moves First
Tai Chi Master George Xu repeats the phrase “Your Body Moves First,” like a mantra. To apply this to running, he advises visualizing your body three or four feet in front of where you are, letting your body move first toward that vision and relaxing your arms and legs. I repeated George’s mantra to myself while running up a long hill in China and visualized my body several feet in front of me. That experience has forever changed my uphill running. It is as if an invisible force is pulling me up the hill. I lean more into the hill and I can feel my shoulders relax. This works on the flat and downhill also, though I notice the difference most on the uphills. Your Body Moves First.
George once told me to visualize that I had a cord attached to the top of my head which was being pulled upward and forward by a giant kite (like the kind the kite-boarders use). It made an instant difference in my ease of running. Like Mary, I use this one on the uphills with great success. I also use it to help balance myself in my forward lean for extended periods of time, so that I’m not too far forward and I’m not too upright. It’s amazing how most activities we do seem to always come down to something about balance. - Danny

ChiWalking Tip — Training Your Leg Muscles to Relax
• Lay on your back, with your left knee bent and your right leg straight.

• Visualize a string attached to your right knee cap. Slowly raise your right knee as if someone was pulling upward on the string, letting your right heel slide closer to you. Slowly slide your heel away until your leg is straight again. Repeat while placing your hand on your lower abdominal muscles. Feel how your core muscles are engaged and notice how your hamstrings, quads, calves and shins can stay relaxed.

• Repeat with your left leg.

• Come to a standing position, align your posture and repeat the exercise. Feel how your core muscles are engaged as your knee tracks forward and notice how your leg muscles stay relaxed.

• Repeat daily, gradually increasing the speed which with you can do this exercise while keeping your leg muscles relaxed. Memorize and reproduce this feeling when ChiWalking.

This is one of the best tips I’ve come across in ages. If you really take it on and practice the exercise, you could reduce your leg swing effort substantially within a month. -Danny

I get lots of questions about whether or not ChiRunning can help sprinters and middle distance runners. I’ve posted a blog on sprinting which I’m sure I’ll add to over time. But, if you’re a competitive runner in the 200m – 5K range, ChiRunning can definitely help your running too. One thing it will take is constant practice. In the ChiRunning book, the training paradigm that I promote is F.D.S. ….practice Form, then train to hold your form for longer Distance, Speed. That’s the order in which the highest level of success is guaranteed. Work on your form first. Then, as you get better at the form, you learn to hold the form at greater distances (or for more time), once your body is acclimated to running with a new technique and has the core-strength conditioning to withstand greater distances, then and only then should you work on adding in speed.

The longer the distance you run, the more amount of time you’ll need to spend landing on your midfoot instead of your forefoot (as sprinters do). If you spend too much time up on your toes, the small muscles of your legs will become overworked and/or over trained and you could end up being a candidate for some form of overuse injury of the lower leg (shin splints, calf pulls, achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, and even metatarsal fractures).

This runs parallel to much of what Arthur Lydiard promoted with his runners…a very deep base of conditioning before adding in speed. When learning the ChiRunning technique, if you add speed in too early on, you risk defaulting back into power running and/or overusing your legs. This is a technique which uses less muscle because you rely much more on your forward lean to reduce your leg muscle usage. Being able to hold a forward lean over a period of time takes additional strengthening of the core muscles of the body. The more you train yourself to rely on your core muscles to run with, the less reliance you’ll have on the small peripheral muscles of the lower legs.

At the same time, looseness in the hips, spine and pelvis are needed in order to get to faster speeds. The idea is to take most of the work off the legs by running with your center of mass, over or slightly ahead of your center of gravity (your point of contact with the ground), while training your body to let go of any extraneous tension which inhibits fluidity in your motion.

For this reason, relaxation is a key component of the ChiRunning technique. You don’t get faster by being tense, or by using more muscle. The Kenyans are not fast because they have the strongest legs. They are fast because they have a great training base, AND they are the most relaxed and most efficient runners in the world. They have relatively low VO2 max numbers compared to athletes they’re competing against and beating. They are also extremely light on their feet and very loose in their pelvic area…something which their competitors have much to learn about.

I’ll be talking about advanced techniques every now and then in this blog. I have been reluctant to talk about speed, because ChiRunning is more about the process than the result and many competitive runners tend to be result oriented. Needless to say, if you work on your technique and then holding your technique for longer distances, the only thing you’ll need to add, in order to pick up speed, is more lean and more relaxation. Speed is a byproduct of having good technique, a relaxed body, and the ability to hold more of a lean (Core muscle strength) for a longer period of time.

Happy trails,
Danny

I’ve been focusing lately on relaxing my quads so that I can get them to work even less than they already do. (It’s a regular practice of mine to use efficiency as my mantra.) Here’s what I’ve been working on. As my leg swings out behind me I allow my spine to twist which in turn allows my hip to go rearward along with my leg. (This is covered on pages 179-180 in the ChiRunning book.)

But, here’s an important aspect of allowing your leg to swing to the rear instead of thinking of swinging it forward. If I think of my leg as swinging to the rear instead of forward, my leading leg (opposite) is much more likely to come down in a mid-foot strike. Whereas, if I lift my leg forward it is more likely to swing too far forward, creating a heel strike. In order to avoid lifting my leg forward, I found that as soon as my rear foot leaves the ground, I need to relax my quads so that I do not engage them to lift my leg forward. The reason why I want to avoid using my quads is because they are the largest muscles in my body; they require lots of fuel and oxygen; and they take time to recover.

What I discovered today was this; in order to keep my quads from engaging I need to keep my knees as low as possible as my feet return to the midfoot strike position. The job of returning my leg to the support phase is left to the recoil action of the tendons in my psoas and hip flexors, which are stretched like elastic bands with each rearward leg swing. The recoiling action of the large tendons in the core muscles takes the place of the quads having to do the work of returning the leg to the support phase.

BUT, keeping my knees low does not imply that I’m keeping my feet low. Quite the opposite. I make sure that my feet are coming up behind me and that my knees bend more as my speed increases.

I know this probably sounds a bit technical, but just take your time digesting it. And when you think you grok what I’m talking about, go out and try it. I will say that this gets into some of the advanced material. I would not expect (or even require) a beginning ChiRunner to be able to apply this to their running in the early stages of learning the ChiRunning form, simply because the basic focuses are more important to think of when you’re first learning this technique.

Happy trails,
Danny

Here is a great interview I recently found, with Jordan Rich of WBZ Boston back in 2006. He asks me some great simple questions about ChiWalking for beginners.

Click the arrow below to hear the interview:

Read even more about ChiWalking and ChiRunning in the news.