Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s Running Form

Jakob Ingebrigtsen is one of the world’s top middle distance runner’s, With over half a million Instagram followers he is definitely one of the most popular. Watch the video below or read on for an analyis of Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s running form.

Among Jakob Ingebrigtsen’s accolades are the gold medal over 1500m at the Tokyo Olympics and winning the 5000 meter world championships in 2022 and 2023.

He also was the first 16 year old to run a mile under 4 minutes. And here’s a fun fact: Just recently he also ran a much slower, but very respectable 5:22 beer mile on his stag night. Today we’ll look at Jakobs running form from a video found on his instagram page.

Cadence

This seems to be a faster track interval as Jakob is running with a relatively high cadence of 202 steps per minute. This compares to a more relaxed cadence of 180 steps / minute we observed for one of Jakob’s slower, longer distance training runs. Cadence of course is to some degree dependent on your pace, with shorter, faster efforts leading to higher cadences.

Foot strike and shank angle

Jakob presents a near perfect mid-foot strike. This helps with load distribution and keeps his ground contact time short. Ground Contact time is the time each foot spends on the ground. In this video we detect a ground contact time of .16 seconds for each foot. Symmetry is important here, as just slight imbalances lead to inefficient running.

His leg extends forward to over 20 degrees, and makes ground contact at 6-7 degrees, creating a powerful sweep of about 15 degrees and making sure he lands close enough to his center of mass. Interestingly that’s the same range of sweep that we found in Kelvin Kiptum’s Running Form Analysis of his recent Chicago Marathon performance where he almost broke 2 hours.

Posture and Upper Body

Moving on to Jakob’s upper body we can see that he runs with good posture. His hips, thorax and head in one straight line, his forward lean at mid-stance is a text-book 5 degrees.

His arms are bent relatively aggressively to support his high cadence. Many runners are surprised when they see this, as often a 90 degree bend is postulated as ideal. Such a large angle is rarely seen in elite runners, other than over very short distances or when accelerating.

Jakob uses his arms effectively letting them swing back naturally. His wrist returns all the way but not beyond the torso’s centerline druing the back swing. During the forward swing he brings the elbow forward to the same centerline.

It is often hard to appreciate how good world class runners really are. One way to do this is to compare your own running form to that of elites.

You certainly shouldn’t and won’t be able to replicate their run form immediately. Having said that a running form analysis will give you a good idea of which parts of your gait to work on. It will also indicate which strength or mobility exercises make sense for you.

If you’d like a running form analysis like get your personal running form analysis here at Movaia.com.