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Running More Relaxed Can Improve Your Performance—Here’s How to Do It

Experts share their best tips to help you stay calm, cool, and collected while you’re out on the run.

It’s possible to run fast without clenching every muscle in your body. Just look at some of the pros like Cole Hocker, Nikki Hiltz, or Sarah Vaughn who seem to clock seriously fast times while making it look like an easy walk (er, run) in the park.

These pros and many others have mastered running with slack shoulders, fluid arms, and a powerful stride, all while seeming light on their feet. It’s the art of running relaxed—and it can actually help your performance.

Experts encourage you to run relaxed on easy and long run days—those workouts where you’re meant to go at an easy effort. But running relaxed is a tool you can use to your benefit for any type of run.

“It is important to remain relaxed in terms of not recruiting muscles that don’t need to be recruited, because that can increase the energy that you’re using for the run,” Heather Milton, M.S., exercise physiologist at NYU Langone Health’s Sports Performance Center tells Runner’s World. This can cause you to fatigue and slow down more quickly, she explains.

For example, lifting your shoulders up toward your ears or tensing up your face while you run requires more energy than letting your upper body and jaw hang a little looser. This could also affect form: If you’re running tensely upright, without a forward lean, you’re less able to activate the glutes, and your knees take on more force, potentially leading to knee pain, Milton explains.

To help you perfect the art of running relaxed and get the most out of your workouts, we tapped experts for their best tips.

Quick Forms Tips to Help You Relax on the Run

When it comes to running relaxed, maintaining the proper running form is key and will help improve your efficiency. Although not everyone’s stride is the same, keep these cues in mind while you’re out clocking miles:

➥Keep Your Upper Half Loose

Run

➥Lean Forward

“What we want to see is that there is a slight angle of your running, so from your ankle through your hips, through your shoulders, you’re progressively closer to your target, looking forward,” Milton says. You can imagine your body in a slight diagonal line as you run forward. This will enable a greater amount of lower leg activation, better push off, and better hip extension. It can also reduce your risk for injury and improve your performance, she explains.

➥Make Your Center Stable

“The core should be a stable column on which we run and can have more effective push off,” says Milton. This is why it's important to build core strength, she adds.

➥Drive Forward With Your Feet

In terms of your feet, Milton recommends you focus on swiping the ground behind you while you run.

8 Tips to Help You Stay Relaxed on the Run

Beyond fixing your form, here are a few things you can try leading up to race day and during your run to help you maintain that relaxed run posture. Rather than implementing all of these tips at once, try out a few of them to see which ones work best for you so you stay calm, cool, and collected on the road.

1. Work on Your Mobility

Limited range of motion can hinder your ability to run more relaxed.

“It really takes access to every joint movement in the body,”John Goldthorp, a certified personal trainer and run coach tells Runner’s World. If you can’t freely move your joints, then you can’t make the necessary movements that you need to help you run really well, he explains.

This is why he recommends working through different planes of motion (front to back, side to side, and rotational) before you run and even on non-running days.

To do that, practice moves like standing cat cow, side bends, and rib cage and pelvic rotations, all of which work the spine and upper body through the different movement patterns. Also, work on pronation

Working with a physical therapist or functional mobility specialist can also help you address these areas so you can improve your range of motion and run more fluidly.

2. Address Any Pain Areas

As you can imagine, or might have even experienced, running with pain can hinder your ability to relax. This is why Milton recommends strength training as a way to address some of your pain points.

For example, address shin splints by strengthening your feet, ankles, calves, and hips. Target pain associated with runner’s knee by strengthening your hips and inner quads.

“Strength training is a great way to make sure that your body is ready for the run,” says Milton.

3. Add Strides to Your Calendar

The key is to practice running short bouts at different paces like your easy, marathon, half marathon, 10K, 5K, and mile pace while relaxed, says Goldthorp. He recommends you start by introducing strides toward the middle or second half of an easy run.

“Like any new stimulus, you’ll want to introduce things gradually both in terms of how many repetitions you do and how fast you’re running them,” he explains. This may mean running four reps of 20-second strides with

Lastly, take a few minutes to gradually progress from a slow walk to a brisk walk and then to a light jog, says Goldthorp. “I always think to myself, I’m not really going to hit my ‘training pace’ for probably about 15 minutes,” so don’t rush it, he says.

This will not only help you ease into the run better, but it can help you find your rhythm more easily and allows you to remain relaxed as you adjust from not running to running slowly to running at a quick clip. Just remember to keep that loose feeling through each progression.

5. Complete a Quick Self Scan

Before you head out for a run, Goldthorp recommends you take note of where you typically hold tension in your body. For example, do you clench your jaw or shrug your shoulders?

“Scan your body. If you notice tension, see if you can let it go, see if you can soften that area,” he says. You can also visualize that area of your body flowing like water.

Then, on the run, check for specific body cues, says Milton. For example, make sure you’re bringing your arms back directly behind you and then letting

If you’re running with a watch on race day “check in and check your splits and make sure that you’re not running too fast, which can create a lot of undue tension,” Milton adds. If you are going too fast, she recommends coming back to your breathing and making sure it feels appropriate for your target pace.

8. Don’t Be Afraid to Give It Your All

There might be times, especially at the end of a workout or race, where we’re willing to get ugly and push past our comfort zone to hit your goal time or beat an opponent, says Accetta. In these moments, it’s acceptable to push yourself even if that means tensing up a bit.

The key is recognizing when to kick it into high gear, like when you’re sprinting to the finish. You don’t want to waste all your energy too soon, Accetta explains. Even when you do pick it up, remember some of those form tips of keeping your upper body loose and your jaw slack so your legs have the energy they need to turnover fast.

(11/16/2024) Views: 49 ⚡AMP