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Some interesting insights, but I wold hazard a big component of the high arm carriage of the East African women is more of a gender issue; namely breast size. For the East Africans, who I’m going to say probably aren’t growing up wearing a good supportive sports bra are then “forced” to run with their arms tucked up high (to support/cradle breasts to limit movement – which is painful!) and thus using their torso to balance the lower extremities. Once they get a nice sponsor and good gear they still run this way as it is natural. You can see this in American women who don’t wear a proper sports bra, arms go up as a cradle for protection.
On a similar note, the “wide arms” group you have, now being women who had access to a proper sports bra, the arms can stay lower, but then are carried wide to avoid chaffing as they rub against the rather thick bra material and also to counterbalance quite a bit of weight swinging around on the torso.
So perhaps this may be why men can/are going to carry their arms lower as they don’t have to worry about extra weight swinging around on their upper bodies.
ReplyInteresting 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.
ReplyI have 120 frames per seconds videos of the elite men and women from London as they passed if you want them.
ReplyThat would be great, Ruairi. Can you email them to me at jae (at) balancedrunner.co.uk?
ReplyI enjoy your thoughts and observations, Jae. They’ve certainly given me a host of things to think about and work through as I run. My mom is a certified practitioner in the Bay Area and I’ve had lessons for various things for 35 years now.
With all that said I do wonder about the insistence on ‘good form’. It strikes me that we all have bodies that are differently shaped and proportioned. Jack Daniels has noted, for example, that when running efficiency is technically measured some heel-strikers do better continuing to strike their heels, while others do better transitioning to forefoot (by technically measured I adopt the definition of consumption of O2 per unit distance traveled). And vise versa (!). The point is not about heel strike per se, but rather that efficiency may not be externally observed by adherence to some pre-conceived notion of ‘form’. This is just to say: efficiency cannot be separated from the definition of the problem that a runner is solving. Past injuries *may* be most cleverly addressed by a runner’s innovative departure from ‘ideal’ (also may not — often accommodations stop serving); different bodies may favor gliding rather than flying; length of torso and neck might affect one person’s ‘ideal’ arm carriage compared to another. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that none of the fastest runners in these marathons are 6’4″; none of them are in their 50s; none of them have particularly stocky builds. The accommodations that various bodies make to the demands of running may require solutions that differ considerably from the methods discovered by many of the elites.
None of this in any way undermines what I think is the essential point of much of your work: running well takes a lot of experimentation, concentration, and discovery of the elusive obvious. I’m just suggesting that perhaps there’s not a single Platonic ideal that each of us must strive for. What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?
ReplyThanks 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.
ReplyAgreed for sure. Most runners, or athletes in general for that matter, do not use the amount of thoracic mobility that nature intends for us to have. This is because we live in such an accommodating world with chairs, cars and even toilets, we rarely have to use the amount of thoracic mobility we are supposed to be using. I consistently assess thoracic movement in extension and rotation in all of my running clients.
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