BIOMECHANICAL RUNNING ANALYSIS
Will it get me a PB and stop me getting injured?
SHOULD I TRY IT?
Words Laura Potter. Photographs iStock
Ten and a half million of us now run regularly – that’s an awful lot of feet pounding on an awful lot of pavements. Experts estimate that the force you send through your joints as you run is between four and seven times your body weight, so that’s an awful lot of injury potential, too. The idea of a biomechanical analysis is to evaluate your running technique, usually using video analysis, to identify any weaknesses or ineiciencies in your running style that could make you prone to injury – or prevent you from bagging a PB.
WHAT’S INVOLVED?
A physiotherapist will monitor how your body reacts when you go from walking to running on a treadmill, and from running to sprinting. It’s ilmed, so they can slow the footage to analyse it frame by frame, identifying weaknesses and underlying causes for your unique running patterns. It’s not just the feet, but the whole body that gets analysed, because the whole body is involved in one chain of movement. They will assess posture, cadence (number of steps per minute), pronation (whether the foot rolls inwards or outwards as it lands) and heel strike (which part of your foot lands first on each stride