Deconstructing the World’s Fastest Half-Marathoner: A Running Form Analysis of Jacob Kiplimo

Is the secret to speed hidden in how your foot hits the ground, or is it all about how relaxed your hands are?

In the latest episode of the Movaia Running Form Podcast, Movaia founder Thomas Butter sits down with physiotherapist and running coach JP Gloria to break down the mechanics of one of the world’s most exciting distance runners: Jacob Kiplimo.

Currently ranked as the #1 road runner in the world and holding the half-marathon world record (a blistering 57:31), Kiplimo’s form offers a masterclass in efficiency. But as you’ll learn in this episode, studying an elite athlete isn’t about copying their stride—it’s about understanding the principles of movement that you can apply to your own running.

In this deep dive, Thomas and JP analyze footage of Kiplimo (See below and check out Jacob Kiplimo’s Instagram channel for more) to discuss:

The “90-Degree Arm” Myth: Why elite runners often carry their arms much higher than the textbooks suggest.
Cadence vs. Stride Length: How Kiplimo maintains a 186 spm cadence and what that means for the everyday runner.
The Truth About “Quad Dominance”: Why fearing your quads might be leading to more injuries, not fewer.
Context Matters: How running on a single-track trail changes foot placement and why “crossover gait” isn’t always a flaw.

Whether you are chasing a PR or just trying to run pain-free, this analysis bridges the gap between elite performance and practical advice.

🎧 Listen & Watch the Full Episode

Watch on YouTube: @Movaia
Listen on Spotify: Movaia Running Podcast
Get your own running form analysis: :movaia.com
Follow JP Gloria on Instagram:@jpgloria.dpt

Read the Full Transcript

Below is the complete transcript of our analysis, edited for clarity.

Thomas Butter (00:00)
Hello, welcome to another episode of the Movaia Running Form Podcast. And as usual, my guest here is JP Gloria. Welcome JP.

JP (00:09)
Hello, and thank you for having me.

Thomas Butter (00:11)
I’m the founder of Movaia where we do running form analysis, JP of course, is a YouTube celebrity as well as coach and physiotherapist.

And we’ll start with unveiling the person we’re going to analyze today: Jacob Kiplimo. he was born, in 2000, which makes him just slightly younger than probably both of us.

He is currently ranked the #1 road runner and also holding the world’s fastest half marathon time set in February this year, where he ran in 56 minutes and change for the 21.1k.

JP (00:48)
It’s an insane record and it gives potential and hope, because if you try to translate it to the marathon. There’s the potential of going for an official sub two hour marathon.

It’ll be interesting to kind of, you know, we’ve talked about run analysis it’ll be interesting to apply it to a runner and grab like, what is practical advice we could grab from a world-class runner?

Thomas Butter (01:09)
Today the footage we’ll be looking at was actually shot in 2022, he was running a half marathon.

Yet at the same time he set the world record for the fastest 15k. his kilometer splits at that race were 2:45. So yeah, let’s get right into it.

We’ll be looking at this video from Jacob Kiplimo’s Instagram. We have this beautiful side view here, when we send this view through our run form analysis algorithm at Movaia.com we get this nice overlays, and a running from report But before we do that JP, are there any things that immediately stand out to you?

JP (01:50)
I think a common denominator in elite runners, especially in this scenario, is just how smooth and coordinated the movement is, right? And that’s something that you’ll find, like not only with running, but you’ll find that in other domains. skilled people make hard things look easy.

He looks like he’s moving, but then you’d be shocked how quickly he’s actually going with this. And that happens with a lot of things. You know, if, for pottery, pottery is a good example. I went, I did pottery like, what is it, two, three months ago? And you know, you’d have the instructor, they would easily make this pot and shape it and all, you know, just easily. It’s like, wow, that looks easy.

And then I try and it, you know, the clay just goes all over the place. So again, it’s just, you know, just looking at this right now, you can see how smooth coordinate is. You could just tell that it’s skillful. And that’s something that we noted with running. And the research backs this up is that, you know, running is a skill. It’s something that can be refined and become better at.

Thomas Butter (02:48)
You mentioned how relaxed and smooth he is. think one of the things I notice also is you really see this when you look at his hands. He’s not clenching them into fists. He’s not having them all extended. It really does look like it’s just very smooth, very relaxed and not spending any extra energy contracting muscles he doesn’t need to.

JP (02:56)
You bring something up with something about arm swing. I think you’ll notice this across plenty of elite runners. You could even look at a sprint start or look at, you could even look at all these runners running and you’ll notice that there’s variability in arm swing. However, I think what you could extrapolate from this is less about what do I need to do specifically with my arm swing, but rather what you don’t have to do. Because a common thought and you know, this was prevalent in the, you know, probably, I don’t know, like five, 10 years ago, the popular notion was, you know, for efficient running, you have to keep your arms at 90 degree angles and.

You know, watching this, that’s not the case, especially with distance running, right? You could see that acute angle, that high, you know, the high arm carriage that’s going on here.

Thomas Butter (04:08)
Yeah, across elite runners we see that quite often the angles are much much sharper than 90 degrees and it probably helps with cadence right because you have a smaller lever.

JP (04:20)
If you practice that, if you keep it at 90, you’ll notice that you’ll stay relatively stiff in the torso. And that that’s probably relatively helpful when there’s high amounts of force in the case of sprinting.

However, if you actually, purposely try to bring your arms up into that, sharp acute angle of the elbows and you go through that movement, you’ll notice that you’ll start to incorporate a little bit more rotation in the torso. And again, I think that, that rotation is helpful in running efficiently.

Thomas Butter (04:48)
That’s a fascinating point. Let’s move on to the steprate.

And the interesting thing is that on Movaia.com, we a cadence analyzer or a predictor, where based on your age, your speed, and your height and a few other factors, can predict the cadence of a runner with those metrics. And the predicted cadence of him is 184. And then when we measure his actual cadence, so his cadence is 186, so very, very close to that predicted cadence corridor. Anything that you want to say about cadence? Do we all need to run at that cadence to be optimal?

JP (05:29)
So 184, 186 steps per minute. I’ve done some analysis on like Eliud Kipchoge when he runs the marathon and he’s roughly sitting around 186 steps per minute as well. However, sometimes I think about this and, you know, I could think about this from multiple vantage points.

I think there’s a popular notion of increasing one’s cadence because essentially you’re reducing the stress per step and that can be helpful when you’re navigating an injury, right? Because you’re taking more steps, you’re reducing the stress per step and that might decrease the irritability, you know, that might help with pain in let’s say the knee area when you’re trying to get back to running. However, when it comes from a performance aspect, it gets a little bit more complex.

Because I would say, you know, yeah, there’s cadence, but it’s the interaction of your cadence, which is how quickly you take steps, along with the force generations that’s happening and causing that step length as well. sure, maybe I can run at 186 steps per minute, but can I copy that step length that’s going on as well?

So roughly around 2:45 minutes for a kilometer, that’s fast. and most people are running at a pace, they’d probably be way above 184 steps per minute, right? They’d probably be 200 plus if they can even reach that speed. And I think that speaks to the interaction of, you know, that complex interaction of cadence, right? It’s not just about copying it, it’s about

finding what works for you. However, obviously we can manipulate cadence to help us with injuries, but sometimes cadence can help us understand the relative effort someone is going at. Because again, cadence kind of can shift depending on, the effort you’re moving at. I think I’ve done multiple analyses on Eliud Kipchoge at different speeds, So for him to give some context for Kipchoge, he was running at 184 steps, 186 steps per minute for the marathon, but when he was running at an easy pace, I think it was roughly around 172 or 174, something along those lines.

Thomas Butter (07:41)
Let’s move on to another blockbuster of a topic, which is foot angle. he has a mid-foot landing. He lands very slightly on his forefoot. we can see that in some frames quite well. ⁓

JP (07:54)
Mm-hmm.

Thomas Butter (07:56)
Yeah, and that is a relatively common foot strike, in elite runners. ⁓ Anything here that’s special or different about Kiplimo, or again, how would that apply to everyday athletes?

JP (08:08)
your foot strike pattern does matter, right? But I think people take it a little too far. So with foot strike pattern, I think about it as force distribution, right? If you land more around the forefoot area, it’ll place more pressure and stresses on the calf ankle complex.

If you land closer to the heel region, it kind of places less pressure into calf ankle complex, but more into the knee. So you could think about it from that view. People will say heel strike is bad, but I think people lump it with overstriding, which is something that we’ll probably talk about a little later in this podcast.

He’s presenting more with a mid to forefoot strike right around there. And I find that like runners in general is as you run at higher efforts or faster speeds relative to yourself, you tend to adopt more of a mid to forefoot strike. It basically shifts toward the balls of the feet.

And as you run a little slower, right, for, you know, longer distances, you might find that you’ll land a little closer to the heel area. you’ll find that one of the differentiators for performance is that these elite runners are able to hold higher effort paces for longer compared to typical runners.

A good example of putting this together is if I was running fast enough to run around my forefoot, would I actually be able to maintain that pace for even 13.1 miles or 20 kilometers? Maybe not.

Thomas Butter (09:32)
Yeah, that’s the difference between running 160k a week and the occasional 5k, I guess. The next aspect is lean. His forward lean is again in a very typical range for elite runners of about four to five degrees at mid stance. Another thing, that’s quite interesting is how little his lean actually changes, right? His body doesn’t seem to be moving, let’s say forward and backward much, compared to some of the other runners there.

JP (10:00)
You’ll find that it could change depending on the terrain. I think we could establish that first. If you’re going uphill, it’s very common to see people move into more of a forward lean, more of a hinge type pattern. But if someone’s going down steep terrain, you’ll find that there’ll be more of a backward lean. with this, sometimes you want to, look at this and you’ll see that Kenyan runners have this just nice, gentle lean forward. It’s not like they’re bending forward. Their whole body is almost leaning forward from the ankles.

Why is that? what is the advantage there? when you think about this, you could practice if you stand up and you lean forward, a little bit, you could do this against the wall, right? Standing in front of a wall, put your hands on the wall and keeping your feet, on the ground, lean forward and then see like, what do you feel?

And typically what you’ll end up feeling is a little bit of a stretch around that calf ankle complex, like the Achilles. Lean basically loads up the Achilles tendon and posterior chain essentially. And remember running is a form of energy storage and release.
So if you’re able to stretch it, you’re able to store more energy and that’s more potential, to generate more force moving you forward during the propulsion phase.

You know, something interesting is, it’s always a balance, right? So we talked about, that slight gentle lean causing a little bit of a potential energy stored, especially in the Achilles area and posterior chain to move you forward. But if you try to lean too much, first of all, you could flat on your face, but if you do lean a lot, then you’ll have less space in the front, so there is more potential to do like an overstride per se. So now there’s, know, yes, we improved the energy storage phase, but how about what happens when the foot lands?

That’s the interesting thing about running. It is a balancing act, essentially.

If you’re leaning backward, So, you know, why do people lean backwards? Maybe if you’re tired, but they’ll do it particularly when you’re going downhill, right? And they’ll do that because they want to increase the breaking forces. They are essentially slowing themselves down so they don’t trip and fall on their face. So it’s way of maintaining control.

Leaning backward will essentially allow you to quicker steps, right? Because now the foot’s landing able to control your ability to change direction, especially if you’re descending steep terrain like you’ll find in trail races.

While it’s helping with maneuverability, right, you’re also sacrificing efficiency as well because essentially you are causing increased braking. you’re putting on the brakes a little bit.

Thomas Butter (12:37)
So if you’re leaning backwards when you run downhill because you want to increase braking forces, that might not be the optimal way to run when you want to go forward fast on the flat surface.

What’s already quite easy to see from this footage here is that he’s not overly, bending forward

He carries his head, right about where it should be. ⁓ Sometimes this, is a bit different from people who tend to sit a lot and I guess as a physio you might also be confronted with some runners having different posture issues.

JP (13:10)
This kind of comes to like, what works for you, right? Because a lot of people look at this and say, how can I make it more optimal? How can I do this, right?

But I think always the first thing that should always happen, know, the priority isn’t to fix something right away. It’s to understand, why are they moving that way? A good example is, if I’m watching him and let’s say he’s almost leaning forward, he’s almost sitting in the saddle, as people like to say, if there’s like an excessive hip hinge forward with the, hips a little bit back and the torso forward, someone will immediately try to fix it.

However, the first thing you need to understand is, well, why are they doing that? Well, in a lot of scenarios, why that may happen is, they have actually pain when going into an upright torso, probably from, the spine. and that’s what’s causing them to lean forward.

So this is where this next decision goes is maybe rather than trying to fix it and causing more pain, maybe we need to address the irritability in the lower spine. And then things will come together.

The first important thing is to understand the runner because sometimes there’s habits that may need to be addressed. But sometimes if you address the root problem, then the body will recalibrate itself to move into a more running form.

Thomas Butter (14:26)
In earlier podcasts, you were also talking about enabling or building the capacity, of runners to actually maintain a certain running form before you actually force that correction, which might just cause another injury.

So I guess that’s consistent with your line of thinking there. The next thing we could talk about is his step pattern So we measured the maximum shank angle so we see how far he swings his leg forward which he does to quite a large extent especially compared to not-so-elite runners, he has a very big leg extension and then he lands with a relatively vertical shank angle about 5 to 6 degrees.

There’s quite a significant difference between the maximum shank angle and the shank angle touchdown, which of course is also product of his speed.

JP (15:12)
With the software here, you’re able to like see those details. Putting this together, I think there’s a lot of things. When some people try to do run analysis they’ll think, they’re overstriding. But the thing is, that’s not the moment of when the foot lands. And that’s why having good footage and good frames per second is really helpful to know that exact moment. But I think some take homes here is, this is kind of a product of speed, right? Why does the leg forward and then come back down, right? It’s a product of the leg swinging forward quickly, and then transitioning into the next phase of the running cycle. Now, what are things that I at least look out for, some practical advice you could grab from this? Well, again, it’s not about of what you need to copy,but rather like what are some take homes that can be applied to other people? You’ll notice that even though he has that long, you know, his leg extends forward, right? As the knee, as the leg comes forward and then it’ll come down, right? You see that happening. However, you’ll notice that his knee doesn’t fully extend straight ahead of the body. You know, something that I’m not looking for is someone trying to like kick a ball, as people would put it.

Because if the leg’s extending too far, then now it’s going to take a lot more time to get into that next running cycle. And two, there’s probably more potential for that foot to really land way ahead of you.

What’s cool about this is understanding that those are two different moments, right? Because even though he has that large maximum shank angle, he still ends up landing relatively close to the body when the foot makes contact, which is good.

Thomas Butter (16:44)
When we look at the arms, I think we can cover maybe several metrics at once. So the arm angles here are much, tighter than the 90 degrees that we often hear. that gives him that extra mobility, that speed with moving also his hands are not moving too far forward or too far backward.

I know you’re also coaching sprinters as well, this would probably be looking very different if you run a sprint or maybe even a 2 or 400 I guess. What are the differences that you would maybe see there?

JP (17:16)
The intention matters. I work with, endurance athletes. work with sprinters. I’ll work with people and I’ve worked with like cowboys, like rodeo. But always the core of this is the same. Well, what is the intention? How do we need to move to best match the intention you’re aiming for?

Right? So it’s important to note that with sprinters, you know, what is the point of sprinting? Essentially, it’s getting to point A to point B as quickly as possible. It’s not really about efficiency, right? Sprinters, the way sprinters move, it’s optimal for the intention they’re aiming for, but it’s largely inefficient. How do you know that? Well, can they maintain that for a mile? Absolutely not. Right?

However, they could get to point A to B as quickly as possible, which is the point, right? With endurance, you know, if you take sprinting form and you apply it to an endurance athlete, boy, they’re going to get tired really quick, But with endurance athletes, it’s a little different where yes, there is a piece of, being optimal, but also finding efficiency.

Right? You’ll basically finding efficiency when you’re running. So, you know, if we take a look at this with the arm angle, I did mention it a little bit earlier, right? Is the arm swing is, you know, what happens when, you know, you’ll notice the arm carriage is different, right? It’s usually tighter, you’ll notice tighter angles overall with endurance athletes. However, when you look at sprinters, usually the arm angles are a little bit larger. They’re closer to that 90, you know, 90 degrees.

And if you play around with that, you’ll notice that, you know, when the arms are a little higher, you use rotation, right? And rotation will help use the elastic properties of your body to help you move forward, along with balancing the body as well. But then when you look at sprinters, if you try to do that same thing with sprinters, what happens? Everything goes all over the place, right? Because there’s a high amount of force going through the leg and…

The arms need to operate in a way where it almost counterbalances and counterbalances the rotational forces of the legs to help them move forward rather to side. So a little bit of my thoughts. technique should follow intention.

Thomas Butter (19:23)
Yeah, it’s interesting to not just look at the metrics, but also to understand why the metrics normally move in a certain range and how that impacts your body. moving further down, we’ll see the ground contact time.

Ground contact time is defined as the time spent on the ground from the moment that the foot touches the ground to the moment it leaves it. So it’s a bit hard to get an exact ground contact time based on the footage that we have here, but it’s somewhere in the range of 0.14, 0.15 seconds, which is very quick for endurance running.

What are the things that influence ground contact time?

JP (20:00)
Having a lower ground contact time, what does that mean? Essentially, you know, you’re able to generate force a little bit more quickly. And efficiency comes from the elastic properties of your body, specifically things like the tendons, right?

So you’re able to be a little bit more bouncy, you’re able to be more elastic, you’re able to generate forces more efficiently compared to something like muscles. You know, you’re mentioning something important. It’s like, well, why does it look like that? And what if it’s way longer, right? Well, we have to look at the whole body and what’s happening. Because sometimes what I’ll find in certain people is like, why is that ground contact time really long? Well, maybe they’re almost overextending at the hips, right? Because it’s less about, ⁓ you know, it’s more about timing.

I think that that’s what I care more about when the foot hits the ground, there’s a timing component. That’s why when we watch him, he looks smooth. Why does he look smooth? It’s because it’s very rhythmic. Then we could look at the opposite though, because sometimes it might look good, but then we realize, you know, when the leg comes down, it’s almost coming off, you know, maybe there’s a high asymmetry between one side and another. Why is that happening?

Well, in certain cases when there’s, I’ve worked with a client, he has a very asymmetrical ground contact time between one leg and another. And that actually seems to be due to actually him having limited ankle movement in his right ankle because he sprained it like five years ago. So, again, this kind of comes to the point of, we need to cue them out of the movement or do we need to use this information, understand what’s going on in the body and address the root cause of what’s going on. And it’s worth changing at this moment, right? And that’ll depend on, you know, the intention. Where are they in the continuum of, you know, their goals? Are they just coming off of an injury? Are they working for a more toward performance? Are they running a 100 meter race? Or are they running a marathon? Are they running, so…

Thomas Butter (21:41)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

JP (22:02)
Yeah, it’s important to understand these things when just navigating both performance and injuries.

Thomas Butter (22:08)
You already mentioned a couple of times how smooth he is, right? one of the things that also drives that smoothness, is how much (or little) he bounces up and down. it’s very hard to get an accurate measurement for this because the footage was recorded, from a motorcycle. But even with all of that, it’s less than 6 % of the body height. How critical is vertical oscillation? Is that something that you’d normally look at?

JP (22:27)
Right, you want less bounce, because that would mean that you’re generating more force moving forward rather than up and down. However, you still want some bounce because the bounce is actually important to help store energy into the posterior chain like the Achilles and therefore move you forward. That’s why, it’s easier to run versus like, let’s say walking you can’t run at the same.

You can’t typically walk at the same speed you run. with running, you’re able to utilize those elastic proper.ties of the tendons much more efficiently. So again, having some vertical oscillation. But obviously, if there’s a lot of it, well, why is that happening? And is it coming from more using the quad?

That would happen if you’re using more quads. That’s expensive to use muscles to try to move you forward. But also, it’s kind of just moving you more so up and down. We could talk about the idea of quad dominance and why I don’t like that term.

Thomas Butter (23:27)
Let’s go right down that quad dominant rabbit hole now that you opened it.

JP (23:32)
Well, because what ends up happening when people think, quaddominants or glutedominants, I think there’s, again, there’s some truth behind it, which is, again, you want to minimize vertical. You want to generate forces to move you forward rather than upward. But when you say the term quaddominant, let’s say, you’re a quaddominant runner:

What does that person do based off of that feedback? Well, my quads are too dominant, so I’ll work on strengthening the hips. You know, that’s great. That’s not a bad idea. But then they start neglecting the quads because they’re too quad dominant. And I think that’s a shame because just being stronger overall is helpful. You don’t want to neglect the quads. The quads aren’t the enemy.

So that’s the reason I don’t like using the term quad dominance to define someone’s running because usually there’s a negative connotation behind it. And typically people end up getting afraid to load up their quads because they don’t want to make it too strong, which is typically not the case.

Thomas Butter (24:31)
And then they open up another issue of being weak there. we’ve covered a lot of topics now we are going to look at Kiplimo from behind.

The video footage is not great. He seems to have quite a stable hip which moves a little bit but not too much. I remember you saying that you don’t want a perfectly stable hip because it could be indicative of something else. At the same time what are the potential issues associated with a larger hip drop or what is a hip drop maybe let’s start with that.

JP (25:01)
Right. Contralateral pelvic hip drop, what does that mean? It means that when you land on that leg and the leg travels under you, and that moment would be called the mid-stance phase, that the hip would drop on that opposite side.

Now, why does it happen? I think some hip drop, you know, people always demonize it. look at that hip drop. You should have none of it. But I find if there there should be some type of drop. And actually, the drop is not the worst thing. Actually, why does drop? Why does that hip drop occur? Maybe there is some type of limited control and coordination through the gluteal area.

But there are some things that it does help us run because when you do have that hip drop, you start to use the the IT band, the iliotibial band. And people think, oh, that’s a bad thing. But actually it’s the second, you know, we talk about the Achilles being the most dominant in terms of energy storage and release when it comes to running. But second is the IT band, actually.

And having some form of, drop actually puts a little bit of stretch on that IT band and that can be potential energy to help you move, to stabilize and move you forward as well. But obviously, I work with people with injuries as well. So in the case of people that have IT band, iliotibial band pain or irritability, which would typically happen on the outer aspect of the knee, maybe we don’t want to use that strategy too much. So yeah, that’s why there’s like a give and take with a lot of this.

And I guess I talked about the potential benefits, which actually is rare. I mean, if you have too much of it, there’s energy leakage. There’s a lot of movement happening. I like to compare it to running on, firm ground versus running in sand. If you run on sand, it’s much more tiring because there’s so much movement, there’s so much energy leakage going on and the same would happen with hip drop occurring. you have to understand why, well, why is that happening? And a lot of times people will say, it’s strength but increased hip drop can happen for more than just gluteal strength. Knee pain can actually affect the control and coordination of those muscles that help you stabilize.

Thomas Butter (26:59)
Mm-hmm.

JP (27:05)
When it comes to trying to change anything, first you have to understand it. Like, you know, is changing this hip drop going to help achieve the goal that they’re looking for when they come see me for a session? However, for me to typically understand that usually has to do with pain or performance, yeah, I will do an in-person exam, but also gathering information from Movaia or something that kind of shows you the running, it tells you lot about a person, right? It gives you clues on the person and how they move and, and hopefully it helps bridge the gap between, how they move and what they tell you. Hopefully you can bridge the gap between those two so it makes sense.

Thomas Butter (27:39)
That’s a great point to mention that in our analysis we don’t have a “bad” section. We have values that we’d normally see in elite runners and we have “workable” values that we often see in mainstream runners.

Then we have a section or a range that’s called “check” because it might not be an area that you actually have to change but it might be an area where if you’re experiencing issues or you want to work on your form. Maybe you want to talk to someone who really knows about the runner and has a medical background. It’s a great tool to understand these areas where I can learn more about my running form.

JP (28:16)
I really appreciate the descriptions It is explaining the nuance of things. Because some people are so overconfident with, ⁓ this is bad or this is the best. it’s just interesting those overly confident people think they know everything about running technique and stuff.

You know, say, yeah, this is the best thing or whatever. And then I’ll actually attach some of the lab equipment on the person. They’ll cue them to do these optimal things and realize they’re maybe not so optimal. And everyone seems to know how elite runners move. And then when you actually apply the data to it, it’s like, yeah, what you’re cuing doesn’t actually, help the runner. It makes things worse or moves them in the opposite direction of what they’re aiming for. Yeah, so I like the nuance, I like that it just appreciates the complexity of running, of movement in general and the interaction with the human body.

Thomas Butter (29:10)
Yeah, yeah.

JP (29:10)
I appreciate the descriptions and how you explain it. It’s not like you say you need to fix this it’s just you could check this, something might be up.

I remember seeing this one person he was adopting such a forefoot, you know, he was on his toes. I’m like, why, why are you running like this? He’s like, you know, you know, this is the optimal way to I’ve heard this is the best way to run. I read born to run all this stuff. Like this is the natural way to run. I’m like, well, aren’t you dealing with like, calf issues. And sure enough, he was, I already had the history. So all I did was, you know, sometimes the best cue is just to tell them that you don’t have to do this. And it’s interesting how the body recalibrates because then all of a sudden he didn’t have those issues. Like he felt really smooth. It felt good. It felt like things were clicking.

And all I did was just tell them that, you know, you don’t have to force yourself to move a specific way just because, you know, just because one person moves optimally one way does not mean that that way works optimally for you.

Thomas Butter (30:11)
A good final point that illustrates this is actually the sweep view where we look at the step width or the crossover gate.

It seems like we’re detecting a slight cross over gait here, right? He’s moving on a non-flat surface with low resolution, but we would see here that the right foot slightly crosses ⁓ the center line.

That’s something that does not seem to have caused him any trouble so far or maybe he has so please Jacob give me a call if it did.

JP (30:44)
But I would want you to go back to that clip again because it’s quite, you know, there’s something to talk about here. Because yeah, sometimes with crossover, why does that matter, right? Because let’s say if someone’s dealing with outer knee pain and they present with crossover, maybe you want to widen the steps so that actually reduces stress on the outer knee and can potentially have them running without pain.

Now, the reason I want to look at this clip is I like to think of the context. I like to think about the person, but I also like to think about the environment around them. And this is a common thing, actually. what happens, and this happens with trail runners, if you get footage of them running, especially in the natural habitat, is they’ll present with like a narrow step width. So they’ll have some crossover. And people will immediately say, it’s because they have weakness in the hips.

Well, if you watch the context, and because this will happen quite a bit is it’ll naturally happen. If you’re running on a very narrow surface, like single track, the feet will kind of land one step in front of the other.

And that’s why it’s not because of weakness, it’s because they’re on a single track trail. But if you put them on the road, it kind of, you know, recalibrates itself. And so with this one, that’s why I’m curious is when we look at this a little further, huh, he’s presenting with a little bit of crossover. Why is that happening? Well, if you watch him a little bit, he seems to be, you know, not immediately in the middle of that particular side of the road and you think about how was that made? Usually two tires, right? Just a lot of driving through there. So there’s probably divots on both sides. Also, you’re noticing that crossover is happening on that right side, but he seems to be shifted a little bit toward that right side of that, ⁓ that area, which may be causing him to do a little bit more of a crossover on the right rather than the left. So point is, is yeah.

Thomas Butter (32:33)
That’s a really fascinating observation,

JP (32:39)
Yeah.

Thomas Butter (32:40)
That’s a great example, as you said, context matters and it’s important to keep these things in mind to not draw the wrong conclusions and to check the wider picture.

Thomas Butter (32:53)
Wow, okay. So that was very cool. Yeah, so I think today we had a fairly quick but extensive overview of just one runner Maybe to summarize, we looked at a pro runner here, like the best road runner in the world. Somebody watching this video who is not the best road runner in the world What should they or should they not do?

JP (33:22)
What works for you might not work for someone else. And I think that’s important to realize because a lot of people will try to copy these elite athletes. And I think there’s a lot to take from it for sure. But just because they run like that and that works for them does not mean it works for you. And I think there is, there is a thing where I think there is things to gather where you could learn. As we talked about, there are certain things that seem to give him a mechanical advantage as he runs, but also understanding ⁓ that you also need to take some time to explore the way that you need to move that works best for you. And sometimes, especially when it comes to most people, the best running form is the one that keeps you consistently running.

Thomas Butter (34:02)
Not running is the surest way to degrade your performance. Alright, I think it’s about a good time to wrap it up.

JP (34:03)
⁓ yeah.

Right. Right.

Thomas Butter (34:13)
What I’d love to do is if you’re listening or watching this and you would like us to look at your own running form, make sure to go to movaia.com slash podcast and let us know. If you want your own running form analysis done. You can also go just go to movaia.com and get your running form analysis there.

So thanks a lot JP for giving us all that valuable insight. If you have any suggestions or ideas, drop us an email at info at movaia.com

Thanks again JP and goodbye to everyone on the show and see you for the next episode. Thank you, bye bye.

JP (34:49)
See you for the next one. Take care.