Energy Efficiency and Injury Prevention

ChiRunning is a running form with two primary merits – energy efficiency and injury prevention.  The technical aspects of the running form that allow you to achieve these merits involve alignment and relaxation.

You align you posture, everything else around it including your arms, legs and feet are soft and relaxed when you run.

You align your posture so that your body weight is supported by your bones, ligaments and tendons (i.e., your skeletal system) instead of your muscles – which can relax.

You align your posture and lean it forward from the ankles to engage the pull of gravity to propel you forward – so the muscles in your legs and feet can relax.

Relaxed muscles are more energy efficient than working muscles and relaxed muscles can’t be fatigued and injured through overuse.

In ChiRunning you also align your posture so that as many parts as possible move in the direction of travel to maximize energy efficiency and you also move these body parts in the manner in which they were designed to prevent injury.

ChiRunning focuses on cooperating with the forces experienced during running by being relaxed and aligned with those forces.  There are two main forces, the force of gravity pulling you down and the force of the road coming at you as it meets your feet.  In ChiRunning you cooperate with the force of gravity by leaning forward and allowing gravity to pull you.  You also cooperate with the force of the road by leaning your posture so that your feet contact the ground underneath or slightly behind your hips and move to the rear in the same direction as the force. If your feet make contact with the ground in front of your hips then they meet the force of the road head on causing an impact, which can result in injury.  Also if your feet contact the ground in front of your hips, this may cause a momentary braking action each time your foot contacts the ground – which is not energy efficient.

So if you stood up right now, and aligned your posture, completely relaxed all the muscles in your legs, especially everything from the knees down and leaned forward from your ankles ever so slightly, your body will start to fall forward and down.  Instinctively you will pick up one of your feet and place it on the ground a foot or two forward to keep you from falling on your face.  Congratulations this may have been your first ChiRunning step!

What if instead of putting that foot down and coming to a halt, you just put it down momentarily and started the forward fall again and then used your other foot for momentary support.  Now you are moving forward in a controlled fall from one foot to the other.  You use gravity not the muscles in your legs and feet to move you forward.  The more relaxed you can make those muscles, the less resistance to the forward pull of gravity and the faster you can go.

The four main components of the ChiRunning form are posture, lean, heel lift and arm swing.  These components will be discussed in upcoming blogs.