Roads to Freedom

A critical part of your progress is sleep, for multiple reasons. Here are a few basic tips.

Good, deep, nasal breathing is a sign of a well trained aerobic system and a healthy parasympathetic response. Stress, lifestyle postures, too much high intensity exercise, poor diet, sleep etc are all involved in problems with breathing, in addition to simply inexperience of running for longer periods. Here are some tips.

Many runners start running to lose weight and it certainly can help a lot. But for maximum results and better health, pay attention to what you eat and when, rather than how much.

Why separate your non-running training into strength and mobility sessions, since they are inter-reliant in movement and not separate at all?

How to integrate running, walking and other varied mindful movement practice for great active recovery and better running consistency.

Many runners are looking to increase their stride length, but few understand the biomechanics involved or how to improve them.

How to optimise your footwear to get the best out of your anatomy, whilst staying out of pain.

Momentum, bodyweight, gravity combining to load elastic energy from the ground and people us forwards with a stride that lengthens behind us.

Moving from working on cadence with short steps as we progress forwards, to effortlessly falling into our first step.

Faster cadence does not mean you are going faster. You might just be running up and down on the spot. But it does improve a lot of the key elements of running form that will enable you to eventually run faster with less effort, because it takes full advantage of your bodyweight, your momentum, your elastic tissues, to get the most out of every landing step. We want to be using the 'free energy' from the ground so that we don't have to create so much ourselves, using our own muscular energy.

Most elite runners achieve a cadence of around 180 or more. There are good biomechanical reasons for this and we can take full advantage of the 'free energy' from the ground to gain more speed with less muscular effort. Here are some simple drills to work on this.

Balance and stability in life, but also in our structure, are vital for runners. A skeleton that is unbalanced in structure in standing posture will be equally so walking and will present a real problem in running, leading to loss of performance and increased injury risk.

One of the essential keys to running faster more easily is to train at LOWER intensity, not higher. This is how elite runners train typically. How does this system work and how do you go about improving it through training?

Is your running mindless? Does your training have a purpose? Can you visualise success? What does it FEEL like? Is this motivating to you? How do you create the HABIT of success? Beware your self-talk and deep-rooted beliefs about yourself. Motivation, habit formation, intelligent, mindful, purposeful practice - these are how we learn all new skills and running is no different.

The basis for the Roads to Freedom movement approach. If you can't stand without effort, you certainly can't walk without effort and it inevitably cost you enormous muscular energy to run. My approach revolves around the idea that muscles, fascia etc. are reacting to ground reaction forces and how they are dissipated through the joints, then using that stored energy to propel you forwards through co-ordinated whole body movement, initiated by the moving arms. So the goal is to enable full 3D motion as required through the joints to let the brain control this to minimise muscular effort through timing and co-ordination. It is a totally integrated approach, rather than the piece by piece, stretching and strengthening methods advocated by many.

Introduction to the 8 keys to fast, efficient, effortless distance running for mature runners. David from Roads to Freedom explains how to run faster or longer with less effort with the Run with Freedom programme.