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After observing the runner while running at a comfortable pace on a treadmill, he first looks for any obvious biomechanical flaws. Next, he determines their stride rate, and if it is low (say around 150-160), he makes use of a digital metronome to help guide patients to a faster stride rate of around 180 steps/min (you can also download an iPhone app that acts as a Adidas Hamburg Dames stride rate metronome). It feels awkward at first (and I can vouch for this as moving to a midfoot strike felt awkward to me for a long time), but with GRADUAL and PROGRESSIVE practice the new gait is learned and the motor patterns become ingrained (I’ll be writing more about this soon). The hope is that the gait change resolves the repetitive stress issue that caused the injury that landed the patient in Blaise’s clinic.One often hears the magic number of 180 strides per minute thrown around these days as being the optimal cadence for a runner, and it is the number that Blaise generally recommends. I believe this number can be traced back to famed coach Dr. Jack Daniels observation Nike Air Max 90 Donne that elite runners tend to run at a stride rate of 180-200 steps/minute. Nike Air Huarache Dames I’m not sure that we have any conclusive data saying that the 180 number is optimal for every person, but Heiderscheit et al. 2011 showed that running with a faster cadence/higher stride rate (5-10% increase) reduced loading on the knee and hip, allowed for a more level carriage of the center of mass (less vertical oscillation), shortened stride length, and created less braking impulse (read my post on the Heiderscheit paper here). All seem like reasonably positive outcomes if you ask me, and this paper might be a useful guide in that a mere 5% increase in you cadence might be all that is necessary to realize some benefit. It turns out that the 170-190 range would probably be where most people would land if they increased cadence by 5-10%.
To determine where Adidas Superstar Mujer I fall out, on my run today I wore a Wahoo fitness footpod that syncs via Nike Roshe Run Mujer an ANT+ sensor (Wahoo Fisica) plugged into my iPhone and gives real-time cadence output. What I found was that my cadence hovered between 182-185 steps per minute for most of the run (pace ranging between 7:30-9:00 min/mile – lots of snow mucked up my ability to run steadily), but on two occasions when I surged to about a 6:30-6:45 min/mile pace, my cadence rose to around 200 steps/min. I wish I had cadence measurements from before I embarked on changing my gait, but I feel quite certain that one of the biggest changes I have made is adopting a shorter, quicker stride, and at this point it is more or less ingrained and feels completely natural to me.I should point out before I wrap up this post that the approach of gait retraining as a treatment protocol for Nike Air Max Thea Femme broken runners is not a new one in the world of physical therapy. Blaise has Nike Air Max 90 Damen been doing this for many years, and Matt Fitzgerald actually wrote an article about gait retraining for Runner’s World back in 2004. As Fitzgerald points out in the article, there has always been some amount of debate about whether running form is too ingrained to be changed. However, recent scientific articles (e.g., this one by Crowell and Davis, 2011), suggest that form change via gait retraining is indeed possible, and that it can stick even after a patient leaves the clinic. My personal experience working on my own form would support this – I run very differently now than I did early in 2010. Is it better? I don’t really know, I just know that it’s different.It’s also worth emphasizing that not everyone needs to pursue form change, or even a change Nike Air Force 1 Womens in shoes for that matter. There seemed to be a general consensus among people Adidas Superstar Dames in the course last weekend that if a runner is running well and has not had injury problems, it’s best to just leave things alone (I clearly didn’t get that message…). In Matt Fitzgerald’s article he quotes Dr. Irene Davis, one of the leading physical therapists working on gait retraining for the treatment of running injuries, who stated “If you try to ‘fix’ your stride when you’re uninjured,” says Davis, “it’s more likely that you’ll cause an injury than prevent one.”