shortening the stride length means less up and down and therefore less energy is used
Using less energy on the unimportant things during a race leaves more energy to power yourself forwards. For example if big arm swings take more energy than little ones, then use the little ones and so leave more energy to power yourself forwards.
What about body motion. The body in addition to moving forwards also seems to do a bit of upping and downing. How much. Just say in a 10k race that you ran 10,000 strides in a race and with each stride your body went up and down by 6 inches. In the race the total up of the body would be 5,000 feet. If each foot of up takes a watt (more wild guessing) then you have just used 5,000 watts on going up and down in a flat race. How much faster could you have run if you hadn't used 5,000 watts on that. It could have pushed you along at 30 seconds per kilometer faster, giving a gain of 5 minutes on your 10k time. I wonder how much truth or usefullness there is in pursuing this.
Have been trying to reduce the ups and downs and one of the ways of doing it has been to shorten and quicken my stride, the pace stays the same but there is less upping and downing.
Have also tried absorbing the ups and downs in my legs so that it doesn't get to my body, now that feels wierd and hard work but it could just be that it is new so am going to stick with this a little more and see where it takes me.
Would be interested in knowing how you could measure the ups and downs the same way you measure pace etc with a gps.
A quick bit of surfing found this article www.timeoutdoors.com/Expert-advice/Running-advice found that by searching on running faster bobbing.
Any comments?
