In my previous post I summarized a slice of what was covered at a three-day course called “New Trends in the Prevention of Running Injuries” that I attended last weekend in West Virginia. In addition to discussing what we do and do not know about the causes of running injuries, the course instructor, Blaise Dubois, a Canadian physiotherapist from Quebec City (Blaise is on the far right in the image below), went in depth www.philshotton.co.uk into some of his treatment Nike Air Max 95 Femme strategies. Blaise feels very strongly that big, bulky modern running shoes are not helpful to runners, and he indicated that he has been prescribing racing flats to his patients for approximately 8 years with good success. In addition to shoe changes, Blaise is also an advocate for natural running Nike Air Max 90 Mujer form, and he feels that the form that Nike Air Max 90 Nike Air Max 2017 Dam Femme high-heeled, heavily cushioned shoes allows is potentially a cause of injury in some (many?) runners.So what exactly is natural running form? Basically, natural running form is the form you would adopt if you regularly ran barefoot. Blaise, however, is a realist, and being from Quebec City where it is ridiculously cold and snowy in winter, he realizes that running barefoot is not going to fly with most of his patients. As such, rather than focusing on minute details www.aquarillon.fr of form, or advising patients to focus on their footstrike or other aspects of biomechanics, he instead focuses initially on cadence (check out Blaise’s 10 Golden Rules here). In addition to flatter shoes, he will generally recommend Nike Air Max Classic BW Femme that patients aim for a stride rate of 170-190 steps per minute, and he finds that this will often be enough for a runner to make a noticeable change in form. If working on cadence Nike Air Max 95 Femme> alone doesn’t achieve the desired result, he adds in other cues such as telling the patient to “make less noise” when they run, or he tells them to “run softly.” Generally, if you’ are pounding the treadmill or ground when you run, it might not be the best thing for your feet and legs. Blaise also does not seem to obsess too much about footstrike – if cadence and form look overall good, a mild “proprioreceptive” heel Adidas Superstar Femme strike is not a big deal for him (Jay Dicharry from the UVA Speed lab echoed this – he indicated that footstrike is highly variable Adidas NMD Femme and not always perfectly correlated with things like impact force). A ground pounding overstride, on the other hand, is a different story – not all heel strikes are created equal.Blaise indicated Nike Air Max 2017 Mens that in his clinical experience, making a shoe change (I love the fact that he prescribes racing flats!), working on increasing cadence, and coaching his patients to run quietly can have often have very positive benefits in terms of helping them overcome chronic injuries. During the course Blaise demonstrated his technique for coaching cadence on several participants – it was pretty amazing to watch. After observing the runner while running at a comfortable pace on a treadmill, he first looks for any obvious Nike Air Max 270 Femme biomechanical flaws. Next, he determines their stride rate, and if it is low (say around 150-160), he makes use of a digital metronome Nike Air VaporMax Dam 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 stride rate metronome). It feels awkward at first (and I can vouch for Nike Air Max 90 Womens Pink this as moving to a midfoot strike felt awkward to me for a long time), but with GRADUAL Nike Air Max 90 Femme Rose 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 Nike Air Max 90 Femme Rose 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 Nike Air Max Classic BW Blaise generally recommends. I believe this number can be traced back to famed coach Dr. Jack Daniels observation that elite runners tend to run at a stride rate of 180-200 steps/minute. I’m not sure that we have any conclusive data saying that the 180 number is optimal Nike Air Max 90 Femme Rose for every person, but Heiderscheit et al. 2011 showed that running www.charleedrew.co.uk 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 Nike Air Nike Air Max 95 Femme Max 2017 Femme 170-190 range would probably be where most people would land if they increased cadence by 5-10%.