Whenever I’ve been asked to be interviewed by the media, I’ve been asked this question…and then been given about 45 seconds to answer. So I challenged myself to come up with a brief description of how ChiRunning and ChiWalking combine the principles of t’ai chi with running and walking, and how that can improve your movement. So here goes… (I’m starting my stopwatch.)

“T’ai chi is the mother of all martial arts, based on the premise that all movement and power originates from your center, not your arms and legs.
For centuries, the Chinese have studied animal movement and found that all movement in the body revolves around a central axis (along the spine) while the arms and legs remain as relaxed as possible and act only as conduits for the force generated by your core.

When these principles of alignment and relaxation are applied in ChiRunning and ChiWalking, efficiency increases and impact with the ground decreases. You can run farther, faster or more often without increasing your risk of injury. Your body no longer breaks down because you’re practicing to run and walk with more fluidity with every step, while using the pull of gravity for propulsion.”

There… 41 seconds flat.

Have a great day,
Danny

Here are a couple of tips for runners and walkers from Mary Lindahl, one of our master instructors who lives in Seattle. She was with us on our recent trip to China and came home with these pearls of wisdom, I’ve added my own notes in italics. These are great tips. The walking one is for anyone interested in making their own walking easier and more efficient. That means you runners need to read it too…it’ll help reduce effort in your leg swing. -Danny

ChiRunning Tip – Your Body Moves First
Tai Chi Master George Xu repeats the phrase “Your Body Moves First,” like a mantra. To apply this to running, he advises visualizing your body three or four feet in front of where you are, letting your body move first toward that vision and relaxing your arms and legs. I repeated George’s mantra to myself while running up a long hill in China and visualized my body several feet in front of me. That experience has forever changed my uphill running. It is as if an invisible force is pulling me up the hill. I lean more into the hill and I can feel my shoulders relax. This works on the flat and downhill also, though I notice the difference most on the uphills. Your Body Moves First.
George once told me to visualize that I had a cord attached to the top of my head which was being pulled upward and forward by a giant kite (like the kind the kite-boarders use). It made an instant difference in my ease of running. Like Mary, I use this one on the uphills with great success. I also use it to help balance myself in my forward lean for extended periods of time, so that I’m not too far forward and I’m not too upright. It’s amazing how most activities we do seem to always come down to something about balance. - Danny

ChiWalking Tip — Training Your Leg Muscles to Relax
• Lay on your back, with your left knee bent and your right leg straight.

• Visualize a string attached to your right knee cap. Slowly raise your right knee as if someone was pulling upward on the string, letting your right heel slide closer to you. Slowly slide your heel away until your leg is straight again. Repeat while placing your hand on your lower abdominal muscles. Feel how your core muscles are engaged and notice how your hamstrings, quads, calves and shins can stay relaxed.

• Repeat with your left leg.

• Come to a standing position, align your posture and repeat the exercise. Feel how your core muscles are engaged as your knee tracks forward and notice how your leg muscles stay relaxed.

• Repeat daily, gradually increasing the speed which with you can do this exercise while keeping your leg muscles relaxed. Memorize and reproduce this feeling when ChiWalking.

This is one of the best tips I’ve come across in ages. If you really take it on and practice the exercise, you could reduce your leg swing effort substantially within a month. -Danny

I get lots of questions about whether or not ChiRunning can help sprinters and middle distance runners. I’ve posted a blog on sprinting which I’m sure I’ll add to over time. But, if you’re a competitive runner in the 200m – 5K range, ChiRunning can definitely help your running too. One thing it will take is constant practice. In the ChiRunning book, the training paradigm that I promote is F.D.S. ….practice Form, then train to hold your form for longer Distance, Speed. That’s the order in which the highest level of success is guaranteed. Work on your form first. Then, as you get better at the form, you learn to hold the form at greater distances (or for more time), once your body is acclimated to running with a new technique and has the core-strength conditioning to withstand greater distances, then and only then should you work on adding in speed.

The longer the distance you run, the more amount of time you’ll need to spend landing on your midfoot instead of your forefoot (as sprinters do). If you spend too much time up on your toes, the small muscles of your legs will become overworked and/or over trained and you could end up being a candidate for some form of overuse injury of the lower leg (shin splints, calf pulls, achilles tendonitis, plantar fasciitis, and even metatarsal fractures).

This runs parallel to much of what Arthur Lydiard promoted with his runners…a very deep base of conditioning before adding in speed. When learning the ChiRunning technique, if you add speed in too early on, you risk defaulting back into power running and/or overusing your legs. This is a technique which uses less muscle because you rely much more on your forward lean to reduce your leg muscle usage. Being able to hold a forward lean over a period of time takes additional strengthening of the core muscles of the body. The more you train yourself to rely on your core muscles to run with, the less reliance you’ll have on the small peripheral muscles of the lower legs.

At the same time, looseness in the hips, spine and pelvis are needed in order to get to faster speeds. The idea is to take most of the work off the legs by running with your center of mass, over or slightly ahead of your center of gravity (your point of contact with the ground), while training your body to let go of any extraneous tension which inhibits fluidity in your motion.

For this reason, relaxation is a key component of the ChiRunning technique. You don’t get faster by being tense, or by using more muscle. The Kenyans are not fast because they have the strongest legs. They are fast because they have a great training base, AND they are the most relaxed and most efficient runners in the world. They have relatively low VO2 max numbers compared to athletes they’re competing against and beating. They are also extremely light on their feet and very loose in their pelvic area…something which their competitors have much to learn about.

I’ll be talking about advanced techniques every now and then in this blog. I have been reluctant to talk about speed, because ChiRunning is more about the process than the result and many competitive runners tend to be result oriented. Needless to say, if you work on your technique and then holding your technique for longer distances, the only thing you’ll need to add, in order to pick up speed, is more lean and more relaxation. Speed is a byproduct of having good technique, a relaxed body, and the ability to hold more of a lean (Core muscle strength) for a longer period of time.

Happy trails,
Danny

I’ve been focusing lately on relaxing my quads so that I can get them to work even less than they already do. (It’s a regular practice of mine to use efficiency as my mantra.) Here’s what I’ve been working on. As my leg swings out behind me I allow my spine to twist which in turn allows my hip to go rearward along with my leg. (This is covered on pages 179-180 in the ChiRunning book.)

But, here’s an important aspect of allowing your leg to swing to the rear instead of thinking of swinging it forward. If I think of my leg as swinging to the rear instead of forward, my leading leg (opposite) is much more likely to come down in a mid-foot strike. Whereas, if I lift my leg forward it is more likely to swing too far forward, creating a heel strike. In order to avoid lifting my leg forward, I found that as soon as my rear foot leaves the ground, I need to relax my quads so that I do not engage them to lift my leg forward. The reason why I want to avoid using my quads is because they are the largest muscles in my body; they require lots of fuel and oxygen; and they take time to recover.

What I discovered today was this; in order to keep my quads from engaging I need to keep my knees as low as possible as my feet return to the midfoot strike position. The job of returning my leg to the support phase is left to the recoil action of the tendons in my psoas and hip flexors, which are stretched like elastic bands with each rearward leg swing. The recoiling action of the large tendons in the core muscles takes the place of the quads having to do the work of returning the leg to the support phase.

BUT, keeping my knees low does not imply that I’m keeping my feet low. Quite the opposite. I make sure that my feet are coming up behind me and that my knees bend more as my speed increases.

I know this probably sounds a bit technical, but just take your time digesting it. And when you think you grok what I’m talking about, go out and try it. I will say that this gets into some of the advanced material. I would not expect (or even require) a beginning ChiRunner to be able to apply this to their running in the early stages of learning the ChiRunning form, simply because the basic focuses are more important to think of when you’re first learning this technique.

Happy trails,
Danny

If you have painful calves here are some things to watch for:

1. Check to see if you are holding any tension in your ankles when you run. Go to your nearest track (or beach if you live near one) and run in the sand (long jump pit). Look to see if your toes make a small dish as you run over the sand. If there’s a divot at the toe of your footprint, it means that you’re either still pushing off with your toes, or you’re holding tension in your ankles.  Run across the sand until you can leave absolutely clean, undisturbed footprints with both feet.You can see this exercise in the DVD.
2. Check to see if your stride is too long. If it is, it will make you use more of your calf muscles as your foot leaves the ground.
3. Check to see if your shoes are too stiff. They should be very flexible in the forefoot. If they’re not, it will cause you to engage your calf muscles needlessly.
4. Look at the bottoms of your shoes to see the wear patterns. If your shoes are worn at the toe, you’re pushing off. If they’re worn at the heal, you’re heel striking, which means that your stride is too long and that you’re reaching with your forward leg.
5. Have someone videotape you to see if you can spot any form discrepancies. Compare what you see to images on the ChiRunning DVD. A good camera shot of your running will reveal tons of great information.
6. Practice relaxing your calves at all times. Not just when you run, but whenever you’re walking around.

Cheers – Danny

Sprinting

ChiRunning can be adapted to sprinting very easily, but first you need to learn the technique at slower speeds and then integrate the focuses into your faster running over time. If you start learning the ChiRunning technique and begin to do too much speed before truly learning the technique you could end up with some sort of hybrid version of your old form and the ChiRunning form. It’s best to learn the ChiRunning technique on your base building runs to keep your learning pure. If you read the book and/or follow the instructional DVD to learn to run, you’ll notice that not much attention is put onto short distance speedwork. This is because sprinters make up such a small subgroup of runners, that there was little need for the information. The ChiRunning technique is geared toward long distance running. Because if this, you’ll have to do some adjustments for faster running that are not in the book. With sprinting, there is much more emphasis on use of the upper body (arm swing and lean) during running. Any time you are running faster than is normally required from most human beings, there is a need for more muscle usage, which is opposite to all you’ll read about in the book. But if you can learn to make your running highly efficient at all times, then when you need to run at sprinting speeds you’ll become a very efficient short distance runner…which equates to speed.

Sprinting, as with running hills, involves an increase in upper body work so that the legs don’t have to carry the total load of running at higher speeds. Your arms should be swinging forward…not to the rear as with the slower paces. Your hands should swing upwards as you lean forward. At sprinting speeds it is most important to be even more relaxed in order for your body to function as a total unit. I suggest also working on strengthening your core muscles, especially your abs. This will allow you to hold your upper body more forward as you take off. If you watch high level sprinters take off, they keep their heads down as long as possible in order to maintain their increased lean for a longer period. You should practice imagining your body as a balloon that is expanding in all directions as you take off…your legs are straightening to the rear as your arms are reaching forward. This creates a balance in your movement. Learn to drive with your pelvis, not your legs and you’ll be able to sustain a higher rate of speed for a longer period of time. This will engage your obliques and all of your core muscles to power the motion of your legs, instead of just using your quads to do the job.

Cheers - Danny

If you’re feeling any soreness in your quads it can be due to several issues:

• It is often due to bending at the waist when you’re running. (see pages 161 & 162 in the book) This will put undue stress onto your quads because they have to “catch” you with each foot strike. When you bend at the waist your feet naturally swing out in front of your body which then creates a heel strike, which is always a direct cause of tired quads. The best thing you can do for your quads is to always run with your center of gravity in front of where your feet are touching the ground so that your stride opens up behind you as soon as your foot hits the ground. If your foot lands anywhere in front of your body, you’re “braking” with each step and you’ll feel it in your quads.
• You might also have too long of a stride which will cause the same result. Running with a shorter stride allows you to keep your foot strike under your body instead of in front of it.
• You are also probably not rotating your pelvis with each stride. (see pages 179 & 180 in the book) Allowing your pelvis to rotate as you run is a great way to cushion the shock to your quads because much of the impact of your foot strike is taken by your pelvis, not by your quads.

Cheers - Danny