Thank you, Barefoot Professor for this amazingly lucid, totally great video about proper running form. Harvard professor of evolutionary biology Daniel Lieberman gives five simple pointers on how he thinks you can run long distances better and injury-free. First of all, don’t overstride….
I always like listening to Dan Lieberman. The natural running movement would have had a more difficult time convincing people that traditional shoes make natural movement, well, unnatural, if there wasn’t somebody with several academic titles supporting it. The one concern I have was the possible misinterpretations of his comment that a runner shouldn’t have a “lean” at the waist, which is true, since bending at the hips is ineffective and usually a compensation for over-striding, A distinction has to be made between a bend at the waist (bad) and a slight lean at the ankles (good). If you watch anybody with excellent form they do have a slight lean in the direction they are going (forward!). Also, oddly enough, there is no mention about the effect traditional shoes have on running mechanics. We probably wouldn’t be having the minimalist/traditionalist debate in Kenya today, or even in the U.S. fifty years ago. Finally, somebody has to standardize the terms “forefoot” running, “midfoot” running and “flatfoot” running, since they are often used interchangeably but have different meanings.