Sprinters are Inefficient: If you want to know what an inefficient runner looks like, watch a sprinter run at 5-minute mile pace. If you are used to watching the smoothness of a runner like Nick Willis, the sprinter’s mechanics don’t look pretty. There’s a stiffness about them as they run slow. Their arms are awkwardly…

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What’s the correct way to run? How do you improve form? How should distance runners sprint? These questions and more are the subject of this 10 minute long breakdown of two middle-distance runners I coach. If you ever had any questions on how to sprint correctly, this video should serve as a helpful introduction to…

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“How did it feel?”  It was an endless process. Run a 100-meter stride, walk back and hear this question repeated over and over. These weren’t the words of some uninformed coach or parent trying to fake their way through coaching, they were spoken by Tom Tellez. And when Tom speaks, there’s a reason for the…

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When we think of fatigue, we generally think of burning muscles, lactic acid building up, and several other descriptors that have rightly or wrongly entered the lingo of endurance athletes and coaches over the years. In essence though, fatigue is all about slowing down, or preventing that from happening. From a coaching standpoint we often…

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The sole of the shoe: With this whole barefoot/minimalist/running mechanics thing exploding right now, one fo the more productive outcomes in science is the realization that the body is smarter than we give it credit for.  All those old biomechanical models that presented the body as rigid mechanical body don’t quite accurately reflect what’s going…

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I was down in Palo Alto this weekend for Stanford’s Payton Jordan Invite.  While I was there, I took some quick high speed video (210fps) of several of the races.  Below you’ll see video from the fast heats of the Women’s 5k, the Women’s 1500m, and the men’s 1500m (heat 1 and 2). Enjoy! Women’s…

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Speed= Stride Rate X Stride length It’s simple. It warrants repeating. Through in Ground contact in and you’ve got a nice model….But I digress… There have been a recent surge in articles and blogs in regards to stride rate. It seemed to start with Jay Dicharry’s blog on stride rate and impact forces. Which led…

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Speed= Stride length X Stride frequency This simple equation is a staple in sprinting and biomechanics material. It simply means that to see a change in speed you’ve either got to increase the ground you cover (stride length) or increase your turnover (stride frequency) or some combination of the two. The bottom line is that…

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