Although there wasn’t any running per se in the Winter Olympics, there was a lot runners could learn from watching classic Nordic and Ski Mountaineering events, especially about armswing, core function, and how to use poles.
For me, the clearest moment was watching the women in the Skimo mixed relay. At the beginning of the race, a difference between Emily Harrop’s uphill form and the rest of the field immediately jumped out at me. She went on to win gold with her partner Thibault Anselmet.
How the Top Skimo Competitors Moved
My rule of thumb when studying elites’ form is not to assume a movement is correct based on a single athlete’s performance… or upon how many athletes do it. However I recognized this particular movement as distinctive of excellent running form, and later on I realized that Marianne Fatton was also doing it, and she and her partner got silver. So it’s worth consideration.
The video below is cued to start at 1:39, the point when I first saw it. Harrop is in the blue French kit in the lead, with race number 3.1. Fatton is initially behind another skier to the left of Fatton, but look for her red and white Swiss kit and race number 2.1 after a couple of seconds.
Watch about 20 seconds, until the camera angle changes, and then go back and use the settings gear in the lower right hand corner to change the playback speed to 0.25% and watch it again, looking at the athletes’ head movement.
You’ll see Harrop’s head move a lot from side to side, always towards the forward leg. Fatton’s head does the same, but not quite as large. Januszyk, 11.1 for Poland, on the far right makes a huge movement but it’s different and we’ll discuss that in a moment.
Everyone else’s head that we can see in this shot hardly moves at all. It’s particularly clear to contrast Harrop with Gibson, 9.1 for the US, since we see them side-by-side.
Why Should We Care About Head Movement?
So what is this movement and why is it good? Why, in fact, isn’t it actually bad, since it seems like “extra” movement not involved in the actual process of locomotion.
To answer that, we need to look at what’s making the head move. If you watch Harrop slowly again, you’ll see that her head movement coincides with the pulses of pole plant/push. As she pushes with a pole her ribcage turns towards that side, supporting the movement of her arm down and back. That side of her ribcage also compresses a little bit and her hip rises slightly as she slides her ski forwards on that side.
So her head isn’t making an independent movement, it’s being carried by the movement of her spine as she does this torso action to push with her pole and lift and slide her leg through. Muscularly, the most obvious thing is that her latissimus dorsi and her obliques on her poling side are simultaneously pushing through the pole and swinging/sliding the free leg forwards.
In running I call this the core action; it’s also known by Serge Gracovetsky’s term the spinal engine. I’ve written a lot about how this works in running. Here’s a quick video:
And here’s a video of Hellen Obiri, who has won the Boston and New York City marathons twice each in addition to many other wins. She is known for doing this movement very large (and is widely and incorrectly criticized for it).
Again, in the running world this was felt to be a wasteful movement, but going back to the skimo the poles add an extra clarity to how this action contributes to gait and makes it more powerful. Even without actual poles connecting our hands to the ground, the core action drives the legs, shifts the weight, and can work elastically.
The Core Action and Propulsion in Skimo and Running
So really, Harrop and Fatton’s head movements aren’t extra movement, they’re caused by the important movement of their spines, and it would require extra work to interfere with this movement. That’s the thing all the other skiers we can see in that video are doing, and it’s costing them energy and depriving them of the full use of their system of springs.
Skiing really shows us how those springs work, because if a skier tries to move explosively forward just as their weight is leaving the back leg, the ski slides backwards instead of the skier moving forwards. It’s the first mistake everyone makes as a newbie on classic Nordic skis (and it’s kind of embarrassing).
The push happens earlier, while the part of the ski with traction still has enough weight on it to grab the snow. That’s the moment of pole plant and push.
Running is exactly the same. Just as on skis, the armswing pulses neither at footstrike nor toe-off, but just after midstance, to create the pulse of force through the body (in the absence of poles) at the most productive moment.
And that brings me back to Januszyck, who has the big head movement and, you’ll see if you look again, a big torso movement to match. Unlike Harrop and Fatton, her poling is not consistenly in sync with her legs; it’s almost like the action of someone skate-skiing. That means she’s sometimes poling as part of the trunk action that moves her legs and sometimes against it, with the lengthening side of her body. So it isn’t consistently helping drive her legs, and instead she’s using more upper body strength to push herself forwards. All that pushing with the arms makes a big head movement but isn’t efficient.
When Does Using Poles Help the Legs and When Does It Hinder Them?
That brings me to the most obvious relationship between these skiers and some runners: using poles. What is the best technique for running with poles, and when is it a psychological crutch that costs more than it’s worth?
We’ve seen that poling in cadence with the leg action is powerful and efficient, whereas not synchronizing the two at the very least requires more upper body strength and may even interfere with the core action. However generally speaking runners are moving at a faster cadence than skiers, and it can be hard to move the poles fast enough.
That said, I attempted to determine Harrop’s cadence in the clip above and got about 160, which is at the lower end of cadence for runners on level ground and probably reasonable for running uphill.
I also checked her cadence running up the stairs in the women’s sprint, since that’s without skis and she changed her pole use. I got 260, which seems awfully high for how it looks, and I’m not sure I’m right. Still, instead of randomly poling she still brought each pole forward at the right moment in the gait cycle for that arm action before doing a longer push through both poles that drove her forward a couple of steps. That’s a clear case of really using upper body strength to take the load off her tired legs, and for the short distance it seemed to pay off.
Somewhere else that I can’t find at the moment she ran up the stairs with a two-pole push every few steps that visibly sped up her legs during the push, which is an even clearer illustration of the same strategy.
By contrast, you’ll see other competitors sometimes using a much more random poling action… and an awful lot of trail runners and even hikers do that as well.
Takeaways for Runners (and Hikers) About How to Use Poles
If your arms and legs aren’t in sync, your core action can only support one of them, they can’t feed into each other, and you’ll need to use more brute strength. So if at all possible you should pole in synchronization with your legs.
If that’s not possible because your cadence is too high, then pick a poling pattern that creates the least interference, know you’re using more brute upper body strength, and make sure the increased energy use is worth it. Probably that would only be the case if your legs are really so fatigued they otherwise can’t keep moving when you really need them to (e.g. when you need to put on a short burst of speed).
If you pole correctly in synch with your legs, you should reduce the demand on your legs enough without having to overuse your upper body that you delay fatigue.
So if you’re a runner who uses poles, don’t automatically assume your legs are going too fast for your arms to synchronize. After all, it’s when you’re going uphill that you’re poling, and you’re moving slower then anyway, so it’s probably more possible than you think.
And when you’re done with your poles, consider whether you can adapt what the skimo athletes do with their skis to switch to running. Is there a fast transition you can make to slap your poles on your back? Carrying them when you’re not using them also interferes with your core action, and their weight and length slows down your armswing, which in turn slows down your legs. Get those things put away if at all possible.
If you’re a hiker, or you hike the uphills on trail runs, synchronize your poling. You can do it, and it will pay off.
To get really good at this, the ultimate training is probably to do some Nordic walking.
Enjoy!