Correct Running Posture

Isabel del Barrio 6 min. of reading Running Leave a comment

If you are a beginner or experienced runner who often experiences recurring discomfort and pain in parts of the body, or if you are prone to injuries, it’s important to consider your running posture.
In any case, improving our running ability is not only possible but something we can work on to maintain optimal form, be more efficient, and most importantly, stay away from injuries.

In this article, we give you the keys to analyze if you are maintaining the correct posture and what points you need to watch.

The optimal posture when running is to keep the torso upright, with a very slight forward lean. This ensures that the spine aligns with the center of mass and the lower limbs, and not too far forward.

Index

1 Techniques for Running with Correct Posture
2 How to Know if You Are Running Correctly?
3 Common Running Technique Mistakes
4 Conclusion

Techniques for Running with Correct Posture

It’s important to remember that the cervical area is part of the spine, just like the upper back. Therefore, these areas should be aligned with the rest of the body-spine avoiding being hunched forward as is common among many runners, or those who present:

Shoulders drooping forward.
Tension in the cervical area due to neck protraction.
Closed thoracic spine.

These details will cause you to avoid falling (body too inclined forward) by advancing your lower limbs to brake. This causes the foot to have its support phase far from the center of mass (located in the middle area of our torso) and from the hip.

Furthermore, having the body excessively leaned forward, in addition to that excessive curvature in the dorsal area, prevents a smooth movement of the thoracic waist and impairs breathing management.

Head and Gaze

If your gaze is downward, about two meters ahead of you, it’s likely your body is too inclined forward and your neck is under strain.

Therefore, your gaze should always be forward, with relaxed shoulders and thinking about reaching up to the sky.

Arms, Shoulders, and Hands

Arms should not cross in front of the body, nor should the elbows be almost extended. Arms should be relaxed with an approximate elbow bend of 90 degrees and slightly close to the body.

In a previous article we detail how you should carry your arms while running to improve your technique and tire less.

Any tension we generate in any part of the body will affect our energy expenditure, so carrying clenched fists will not benefit you.

The ideal is to keep your hands semi-closed but without generating tension, as if you were carrying an egg in each hand that cannot be broken or dropped.

Back, Abdomen, and Hips

To maintain good posture and also protect the spine from impacts, it is important to work your entire core area: the deep transverse abdominis, the obliques, the rectus abdominis, the lumbar square, and the dorsal area.

This will allow you to have a solid and strong muscular structure in your trunk to be able to stay upright over the kilometers and not lose your posture.

The glutes are a fundamental muscle group in running, as they are responsible for stabilizing the hip and also protecting the lower back.

Strong glutes will prevent the spine from having many oscillations and unwanted rotations of the lumbar area.

Moreover, the more stable our hips are, the more stable our knees will be, thus avoiding many of the common injuries in runners.

Legs, Knees, and Feet

The alignment of these three structures is key to a correct technique and a natural support that favors running economy, proper absorption of impact forces, and a technique less prone to injuries.

Having ankles with good mobility and stability will ensure that the supports are more secure and the ankle and other structures move efficiently and quickly.

Knees should maintain good stability with each support, preventing them from falling inward (dynamic knee valgus), thus breaking the correct alignment and with a high incidence of injury.

Everything must move synchronously and harmoniously, i.e., naturally so that the pattern is as efficient as possible and we use less energy.

How to Know if You Are Running Correctly?

The simplest and most practical way is to visit a physical exercise professional specialized in biomechanical analysis of running to identify your functional mobility, as well as analyze your walking and running technique and from there detect possible errors to improve your technique.

Another simple option is for someone to record you while you run in the way you usually do, so that with the recording you will have immediate feedback on how you run and your perceptions. You will have to review the points to watch seen in the previous section: gaze, trunk position, arm movement, where the foot falls in the maximum support phase, running cadence…

If you also tend to have a lot of tension in areas like: the neck, trapezius, lumbar area after running, these can be indicators that your posture can be improved.

Common Running Technique Mistakes

Having seen the above, we summarize the most frequent errors when running that you will need to watch if you want to improve your running technique:

Gaze at the ground and/or neck bent forward (cervical tension).
Body excessively leaned forward and hunched shoulders.
Too long strides that cause supports far from the center of mass (Greater impact for the knees).
Running cadences lower than 170 steps per minute (longer contact times and more muscle expenditure, less efficiency).
Arms with elbows barely bent.

Conclusion

As you can see, these are points that we can improve easily and by becoming aware in our next sessions in order to improve our running form.

Even small changes in practice, the benefits you will notice in your running technique and the decrease in discomfort from these errors are more than enough reasons to find new motivation when running.

Recommended Reading

López Chicharro, José; Sánchez, Domingo. “Physiology and Fitness for Runners”, Prowellness Editorial, 2014.
Mc. Dougall, Christopher; Orton,Eric. “Born to Run 2”, Knopf Publisher, 2022.
Napier, Chris. “Running: Improve Your Technique, Avoid Injuries, Perfect Your Training”, Penguin Random House, 2023.

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