Correcting running fundamentals can lead to pain-free training
How many of you recall your mother telling you to, “Sit up straight, stand up straight, don’t slouch, pick up your feet, quit shuffling along,” when you were in grade school and maybe as a teenager? It was good advice and if you followed her instructions, you prevented a number of posture problems when you became an adult. This advice is especially true if you are a runner. I have seen some runners that did not follow Mom’s advice and suffer from the results. Two immediate problems include running a much slower pace and nagging injuries if you run distance races. Early in my running career I had to make a couple of necessary gait changes when I started to train for marathons. Both were due to poor posture and the results of doing improper exercises.
Both problems were in the hip area. The first problem was my feet were flaring outward at a 45 degree angle. That meant that when my foot hit the ground for a push off, I was landing on my heel and the weight transferred over the arch of my foot to the toes for the push off. This limited the amount of push off available from the foot and muscles of the calf. The hip flexor muscle (the ilio-psoas muscle) was the main muscle to bring the leg forward. This didn’t bother me when I ran shorter distances. But when the distance increased the ilio-psoas became strained and sore. I changed my running style to where I felt I was running "pigeon-toed." My foot plant was now straight ahead and allowed the leverage of the foot to go over the bone structure on the outside of my foot. This also brought in the calf muscle to help move the leg forward. This not only increased my running pace but eliminated that soreness of the ilio-psoas muscle.
The other problem was also a result of the ilio-psoas muscle. For years I did leg lift exercises to strengthen my lower abdominal muscles. In football days, our coach had us do leg split movements with our feet six inches off the ground. After taking a kinesiology class I learned that muscles attach to two bones that cross over a joint. When a muscle contracts it can move both bones on either side of the joint. When a muscle contracts and shortens it does so at both ends. If you want just one end to shorten you need another muscle to contract to stabilize the bone you don’t want to move. In this case the ilio-psoas attached to the inner part of the upper leg bone (the femur) for one attachment, and the lumbar vertebra in the back and the inside of the pelvic bone, for the other attachment. When the ilio-psoas contracted it could either flex the upper leg or cause the back to arch. If a person wanted to do a leg lift, and not move the low back, a stabilizing muscle was needed to prevent this from happening. That muscle is the abdominal muscle that attaches to the front of the pelvic bone. The abdominal muscle contracts to keep the pelvic bone level and not allow it to tilt forward and arch the back. If the abdominal muscle is not strong enough to hold the weight of the legs, the abdominal muscle is strained, the pelvic bone tilts forward, and the low back arches.
After years of doing leg lifts my ilio-psoas was strong, but my abdominal muscle had been strained and resulted in a “stretch weakness.” This resulted in a lengthening of the abdominal muscle to the point that I walked, and ran, with a forward pelvic tilt and sway back. The one thing to understand is that the abdominal muscle is the only support for your internal organs. The lungs have the ribs, and the arms and legs have bones to keep them in place. The abdominal muscle is the only support available to hold the internal organs in place. If the abdominal muscle is stretched, and the result is a forward tilt of the pelvic bone, and a sway back, then the internal organs will slide forward to the inner wall of the abdominal muscle.
What happens to runners with this scenario is that with every foot strike on the ground, the internal organs are forced, or ‘slammed’, against the lower attachment of the abdominal muscle. It did not take that many long runs between 10-15 miles before my lower abdominal muscle was sore. The lower fibers were being stretched and the attachment to the bone was being strained. The constant pounding from my feet forced the internal organs against the abdominal wall and was causing the abdominal muscle to stretch. It was a painful lesson to learn that a level pelvic girdle is necessary if you want to train for a marathon.
When I corrected the foot placement to point straight ahead, and I strengthened my abdominal muscle enough to keep my pelvic girdle level, I could now train long distances pain free. Those long ago corrections my mother kept telling me had come full circle and now made much more sense other than the aggravation it seemed to be as a teenager. Now “Stand up straight,” and “Don’t slouch,” are still followed and the problems that result from poor posture are absent.
