Run Faster

While it’s true that the lower half of our bodies do the bulk of the work when we’re running, it’s good to keep in mind that running really is a whole body activity. If you don’t believe me, try a quick experiment: run for about 100 yards with your arms folded across your chest or hanging at your sides. Awkward and slow, isn’t it?

Even though it’s pretty easy to establish that your arms do play an important role in running, it seems that there isn’t complete agreement about the best way to move them:

• In Galloway’s Book on Running, Jeff Galloway says “the less arm swing, the better” and that you should “let gravity do your arm work”. If you don’t have Jeff’s book, you can see an excerpt from this section of the book on google book search.
• Danny Dreyer of Chi Running says you should concentrate on swinging your arms to the rear rather than to the front because a frontward swing will cause your legs to swing too far forward and create too much heel strike, and that you should use your arm swing to set your cadence. See this article on the ChiRunning site for more of Danny’s thoughts about arm swing while running.
• Dr. Romanov, author of the Pose Method, seems to agree with Jeff Galloway, saying that you should keep your arms bent at the elbow and relaxed, allowing them to react to your leg movement. See a short article on this at the Pose web site.

Personally, if I try to just let my arms react to my leg movement like Galloway and Romanov seem to advocate, I feel like they start to drop a bit and slow me down. So I tend to buy a bit more into Danny Dreyer’s philosophy that your arms should play a slightly more active role in your running.

Despite the slight disagreements about how active your arms should be while you run, most experts I’ve read seem to agree on at least these points about arm movement and positioning:

• You should keep your arms tucked in close to your body and relaxed
• Your arms should move forward and back, not across your body

So what do you think? What do you do with your arms while you are running?

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Physics dictates that there are only two ways (or 3 ways, if you combine the two) to run faster:

• Increasing your stride rate (also known as leg turnover)
• Increasing your stride length

According to this article in Running Times, elite runners have a stride rate of about 180 steps per minute, while recreational runners take about 165-175 steps per minute. So you can see that most of us have quite a bit of room for improvement. Even if you are already taking about 175 steps per minute, you can increase your speed by approximately 3% just by increasing your stride rate to 180 steps per minute.

You can easily measure your stride rate by running for one minute, counting your strides as you run. Once you have your baseline, you can work on increasing that number. However, it’s probably better to calculate both your stride rate and your stride length so you can make sure that you are not increasing your stride rate at the expense of decreasing your stride length, since if you increase one by 1% and decrease the other by 1%, you’ll end up with no net gain. You can also make this calculation fairly easily by running for 1 minute, counting your strides as you go, then dividing the distance you covered by the number of strides.

So now that I’ve convinced you to try to increase your stride rate, you’re probably wondering how best to do that. Here are a few workout ideas:

• Downhill strides - find a gentle slope, and after warming up, start at the top of the slope and allow gravity to help you to accelerate. Repeat 4-6 times.
• Striders - after warming up, run 8-10 accelerations of about 80-100 meters. You’ll want to accelerate gradually so that you’re up to ‘full’ speed about halfway through each acceleration, and you’ll hold that speed through the rest of the acceleration.
• Hot coals - visualize running on a bed of hot coals, trying to step as quickly as possible over them. Do this for about 50 yards at a time.

For more ideas on improving your stride rate, consider taking a look at these resources:

• Training for Speed, Agility, and Quickness
• Run Less, Run Faster

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