Interesting theory, Ben, though a flaw is that there most definitely are men who run with the very high arms as well, there just didn’t happen to be any in London this year. Tsegaye Kebede, who won the London, Paris, and Fukuoa marathons twice each as well as the Chicago marathon once, is a prime example. High arms work well biomechanically for the reasons I gave, though as a woman I fail to see how they could support the breasts–the arms are moving too much for that!

The effect of sports bras to encourage the “wide arms” style is real but different than you suggest: they are nearly always too tight around the lower ribcage, interfering with movement of the spine and ribs and diaphragm as well. This tends to stiffen the torso and requires a runner to overemphasize swinging their arms. It’s a major problem I’ve written about elsewhere, and I strongly recommend women do whatever it takes to make sure their bra doesn’t in any way impinge on their trunk movement or breathing, even if it means taking a pair of scissors to the lower band. And each woman should seriously consider whether they need a sports bra — women who don’t need a lot of support shouldn’t default to wearing a constricting, performance-imparing garment. This is a really individual issue each woman has to sort out for themselves. Thanks for bringing it up, it definitely is relevant.

That would be great, Ruairi. Can you email them to me at jae (at) balancedrunner.co.uk?

Thanks for your thoughtful comments, Antony. Your question is one I get on this blog a couple of times a year from runners who’ve had a deep experience of the Feldenkrais Method not directly connected to their running, and I obviously would do best to write a blog post about it. Meanwhile, though, let me try to give you a succinct answer. What I’m doing is the exact opposite of proposing a Platonic ideal of “good form.” In my training to become a Feldenkrais practitioner, the question you’re asking was raised as a central question for every practitioner: how can we say there is any norm or basic principle for how to do any activity, wouldn’t everyone do everything differently because their bodies and histories are different? So how can a practitioner look at how a person gets out of a chair or walks or plays violin and come to any conclusion about what could be improved, what the person needs to learn to feel more comfortable and satisified with how they do the action? In answer to that question, my teacher pointed out that before a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lesson practically every one of the fifty people in the room were lying on our backs differently. After the lesson we were all lying nearly identically. The way we lay before the lesson reflected our personal habits, the way we lay afterwards reflected something we might call phylogenetic, which Dr. Feldenkrais called our biological inheritance. Feldenkrais practitioners spend our professional training learning to deeply understand this biological inheritance, and in my professional practice my focus has been on understanding running as part of our biological inheritance. After more than a decade of using the Feldenkrais Method to help runners I have seen the movement patterns I write about emerge in each person’s running without exception! So I write and speak about what I’ve learned in addition to giving Feldenkrais lessons because it benefits many runners–and I believe it benefits the whole running community–to learn how running works using this experiential framework of our phylogeny rather than the collection of poorly applied biomechanical principles, poorly thought-out “commonsense” recommendations, and culturally biased notions of human function that characterize the bulk of popular running form advice.