According to some experts, every step you take while running puts anywhere from 5 to 12 times your body weight of force into your body. If your joints are healthy with adequate mobility, if your muscles are strong enough, and if you don’t overtrain, your body will adapt to this stress and continue to get stronger and faster. BUT if your mobility is limited, you have imbalances in muscular strength, or you do too much too fast, you’re on the path to injury if you haven’t gotten injured already.

Your feet, ankles, and calves are the first line of defense to absorbing the stress from each step of your runs. If your ankles are so limited that your knees can’t get past your toes (without shoes on), you are for sure on the path to ankle, knee or hip issues.

All of our programs start with joint assessment, identifying which of your joints have limitations below a specific human standard. We then build out your warm up and, in a short time, assign you homework to work on these limitations and improve mobility issues. Maybe you have no mobility issues. We don’t see this very often but it does happen. The next question is how strong is your posterior chain. Most great runners, and great athletes in general, can deadlift at least 1.5 times their bodyweight.

If you want to kick hard on uphills and push through at the end of the race, you want strength.

In particular more strength in your posterior chain. Deadlifts, weighted hip bridges, the glute ham developer, kettlebell swings, are all effective exercises for building a strong posterior chain to help runners kick hard on the uphills, push through fatigue, and kick it into the finish line ahead of their competition.

We’d love to help you take your running and racing to the next level.

“First move well, then move often.”
– Dr. Ed Thomas, Professor and Physical Culture Historian

“Make joints move nice.”
– Dr. Andreo Spina, Kinesiologist, Dr of Chiropractic, Sports Science Fellow, and founder of Functional Range Conditioning