Upper body rotation is obviously important in sports such as baseball, discus etc. While it’s importance in sports such as running are less obvious, all of these sports suffer from the inability to find equal rotation in both sides.

Understanding rotation during running is best understood through realising the way joints rotate when we walk. 

When we walk, the process of walking sees joints opening and closing in the feet, which (should) see the lower leg also rotating internally and externally. Following this up sees the upper leg doing similar movements a little faster, and the hip then moves in various planes as the leg moves back and forth.

As the joints through the body move, they pull on the muscles to load them like an elastic band, then pulling them back towards neutral, and to rotate in the opposite direction.

The main problems I see with runners being able to do this normal process is:

• Rotating more on one side than the other
• Lack of rotation in one...

To your seasoned runner, the word pronation comes with all the connotations of a 4-eyed young overpaid Englishman, waving a crooked wand around and casting the spell of running doom on you, as you are destined to years of running injuries and poor technique.

Unless, of course, you fork out a few hard earned dollars for the latest and greatest shoes, designed to rid you of your over-pronation curse....

Let me kick off with something that might get your shoelaces in a knot.

There is no such thing as over pronation.

In fact, I don’t even like to use the term pronation at all, when describing a foot.

Because pronation is an ACTION.

It is the beautiful cosmic synchronicity of 33 joints and 28ish bones opening and closing, as muscles load and preload, to frame the amazing sequence of events that we call walking, or in this case, running. But as should rightfully crawl before you run, in this case we might look at how you walk before you run.

What is pronation?

If we can...

3 mistakes runners make when warming up that could reduce over 79% of injuries

79% is a weird number right. But research has shown that this is potentially the amount of runners that are injured every year as a result of..running. I always take these figures with a grain of salt, but if you run, and know others that run, you can be sure that one of you has been injured in the last year.

And it sucks.

There a lot of things that runners do wrong, and having trained some of the worlds best, I can tell you, that if I went down the road of listing all of the mistakes, you would still be reading this 2 weeks later.

Ain't nobody got time for that.

Here we’ll look some simple ways you can integrate some fixes into your warm up, and get rid of the common mistakes being made prior to a run.

Firstly, why do we warm up at all?

When it comes to running there are 3 factors that we need to address in our warm up;

-Increase aerobic demand
-Prime the nervous system for work...