• Coaching
    • Plans
    • My Philosophy
    • About Me
  • VLOG
  • Blog
  • Team🍊
    • Login
    • Dashboard
    • Merch
  • Coaching
    • Plans
    • My Philosophy
    • About Me
  • VLOG
  • Blog
  • Team🍊
    • Login
    • Dashboard
    • Merch

Elastic Energy in Running

Have you ever looked at some of the quicker runners and thought how easy they make it look. Tall, elegant and fast! It’s annoying right?

What if I told you that they were in fact putting in less effort than you. How you ask? By utilising their biomechanical energy returns. Say what? I’m talking about elastic energy.

This is something I’ve learned about on my Level 3 EA course, so apologies to any experts if my terminology is slightly off. EA (England Athletics) state in their text that between 30 – 50% of the energy required to run can be created by the elasticity in our tendons and muscles. Up to 50%. Imagine that.

So suddenly it makes sense why these quicker runners are seemingly flying down the finishing stretch. They are literally bouncing their way to quicker times.

So how does it work? Well in simple terms, our legs can act like pogo sticks. Our tendons can act like elastic bands, storing and returning energy to the body and saving the muscles from having to do all the hard work.

So how do we capatalise on what is essentially a free energy supply? Well first and foremost we can improve our running form. Imagine an elastic band. If it’s limp then there is very little energy stored. But if you stretch the elastic band, making it nice and tall, suddenly it’s bursting with energy.

As athletes we need to run tall to create tension in the fascial system and in turn this will make us more springy (technical term). We’ve all been in races where our shoulders slump, our head drops and it feels like we can’t go any further. If we run in this state we are producing almost none of that free elastic energy which is available to us.

Can we improve our elastic strength through training? You bet we can. So how do we do this? By introducing some plyometrics, jumps and bounding into your training.

Having recently learned about this myself it is something I will be introducing into my next training plan and also for some of my runners.

Please be careful though. Some of the exercises like bounding and hopping can apply quite a big force and if you do too much too soon then you increase the risk of injury.

If you found this article interesting then please like on social media and comment to help promote pb runner. Thanks for reading and remember, run tall to use that free elastic energy.

Coach Simon.

Coach Simon

Subscribe
Login
Notify of
guest
guest
0 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments

MORE RUNNING TIPS

Learn from your mistakes

Possibly one of the best pieces of advice you'll ever receive in life. Not just from running, but all aspects...

Warming Up

Hands up who didn't manage a 10 minute warm up at efforts yesterday? 🙄 I get it, sometimes I'm a...

Fuelling Correctly on Your Long Runs

You may have already noticed it's long run season. Here in Hastings, between 30-40 of us have been sacrificing a...

Grasp the Opportunity

I love the Running Channel. If you're not one of their 624,000 You Tube subscribers then I recommend you head...

Rest Days are Training Days

The importance of rest days in your training plan cannot be emphasised enough. This is where our body has the...

Refueling After a Long Run

Nutrition isn't my strong point and as an online running coach my advice would be to speak to an expert...

www.pbrunner.co.uk. All Rights Reserved. 2022

Logout

wpDiscuz

We are using cookies to give you the best experience on our website.

You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in .

PBrunner
Powered by  GDPR Cookie Compliance
Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.

If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.