Our articles are not designed to replace medical advice. If you have an injury we recommend seeing a qualified health professional.
As a runner who is keen to find ways to run better and help others to do the same, I’ve often pondered the question – what is the most efficient way to run?
New research from Bas Van Hooren and colleagues in Sports Medicine has tried to answer this by completing a systematic review and meta-analysis. They included 51 studies with 1115 runners!
What did they find?
A higher step rate (cadence) and higher vertical stiffness and leg stiffness were associated with lower energy cost/ better running economy. Reduced vertical oscillation and trunk flexion may also help efficiency. Greater knee flexion in swing is often encouraged by coaches but may actually be associated with poorer running economy!
We’ve summarised their findings at different stages in the running gait cycle in the images below (adapted from Van Hooren et al. 2024):
How might we apply this clinically?
Runners with a low step rate (e.g. less than 175) may benefit from a small increase (e.g. 3 to 8%), which can be achieved by running to the beat of a metronome or music. This can help address over-striding (which is thought to reduce efficiency) and improve leg stiffness and reduce vertical oscillation. Encouraging a more upright trunk position may help efficiency too.
Strength training and/or plyometrics may also help running economy by increasing lower limb stiffness.
Runners are often advised to switch to forefoot strike to improve efficiency but this review concluded that running economy did not significantly differ between rearfoot or midfoot/forefoot strikers. Increasing knee flexion during swing is also commonly suggested but this may be associated with worse running economy and higher energy cost.
This shows that we need to be wary of a one-size-fits-all all approach – recommendations should be based on individual assessment and needs.
Runners often really value gait analysis and advice on improving their technique so we’ve a detailed module devoted to it in Running Repairs Online. Find out more about our online course and how it will help you get great results with injured runners here.
A few things to consider…
The associations between biomechanics and economy were often small to moderate and, in some cases, were non-significant or ‘trivial’. There’s also limited evidence that biomechanical changes lead to improved performance.
Changing running gait takes effort which will come at a metabolic cost (especially initially) so any benefits need to outweigh these costs to improve economy/ efficiency.
There’s lots of great detail in the paper so I’d highly recommend reading this open access review. Here’s the link https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-024-01997-3
