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Running Form and Injury

In general people worry too much about running form as it relates to injury. By that I don’t mean that running form doesn’t matter. It does—a lot. But bad running form is more an indicator that you have something going on that can lead to injury than a primary cause of injury.

That is, let’s say when you run your feet splay out to the side. (Check this the next time you run through snow or with wet shoes on dry pavement.) That flaw in your form will certainly make you slower and could lead to other form issues as your body attempts to compensate. But the original matter of splayed feet is a secondary matter stemming from tightness or weakness in your body. (In this case, most likely tight hip flexors, the muscles along the front top of your thighs.) That weakness is leading to the bad aspect of running form, and that weakness might very well over time cause compensations elsewhere in your body that will lead to injury, often not where the original problem is.

So the way to think about good running form as it relates to injury isn’t to obsess over how you’re running all the time and monitoring yourself with every step. Rather, as you notice deviations from the basics of good running form, take those as signs of weakness or tightness that need to be addressed. When you successfully improve those underlying weaknesses or tightnesses, the form issues should go away on their own without you having to be constantly conscious of them.