Creating The Perfect Running Form - Shane Benzie - #440

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello friends, welcome back to this show. My guest today is Shane Benzie. He's a running coach, movement specialist, researcher and the founder of Running Reborn. Shane has traveled around the world to observe and analyze African tribes, Nepalese Sherpas and Arctic Inuits in an effort to uncover the fundamentals of elite human movement. He's now applying what he learned to correct and enhance the form of the world's best runners. Expect to learn how Sherpas can be so strong when they're so small, why changing your running cadence isn't a solution to all of your problems, whether minimalist running shoes help or hinder what Shane learned about ancestral running patterns, plus his breakdown of the optimal head position, foot strike, hand and arm relationship, breathing pattern, stride length and much more. Bit of an update, I am back in Austin after a couple of weeks in New York City. It feels very nice to not be living exclusively out of a suitcase. I am looking forward to having some semblance of a routine. That will feel pretty good. But it's been a very fun few weeks. I'm going to be talking about what I got up to on some upcoming episodes, plus the newsletter. If you want to find out about that, go to chriswillex.com/books and you can sign up for free. But now, please welcome Shane Benzie.
Shane Benzie, welcome to the show.

**Shane Benzie** (1:44)
Thank you for the invite.

**Chris Williamson** (1:46)
You were just in Portugal, tell me what you were doing.

**Shane Benzie** (1:48)
I was just in Portugal. So I was in a place called Nazaré, and Nazaré has the biggest waves in the world. So it's on the Atlantic coast, and it has huge waves. And I'm predominantly a running coach, but actually more and more I'm becoming a movement coach with different sports. And I'm actually working on a project out there studying and coaching some of the big wave surfers.
So these guys are surfing waves up to sort of 70, 80 feet. So I'm really getting excited about, you know, their foot contact on the board. How are they balancing on that board? You know, what are they doing? What's their perception of their movement, their mental approach to something that's pretty dangerous and that you can't just go out every day and practice because of course these big waves only come sometimes. So I use very clever sensors to put in their boots to kind of have a look at how they're interacting with the board and all sorts of stuff. And that does, believe it or not, feed back into running.

**Chris Williamson** (2:44)
What is the similarity between surfing and running?

**Shane Benzie** (2:48)
So for me, if I'm coaching running, one of the big things I get excited about with running is the foot. The human foot is a very, very clever thing. And I like to think of the foot as the interface between us and the ground. If the foot lands well and if the foot leaves the ground well when we run, it creates stability, it creates elasticity, it creates amazing proprioception from the quarter of a million nerves on the bottom of it, it spreads impact, it does loads of amazing things. So if I can understand how the foot interacts with lots of other surfaces and in other sports, then I can learn some very interesting things about maybe how we should land the foot and leave the ground when we run.

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
What are some of the things that you've learned since working with these psychopathic surfers?

**Shane Benzie** (3:36)
Well, one of the other big things about sport as well is the mental approach, you know, that's extremely important. So we're learning all the time about the foot. When I'm looking at foot contact in whatever sport it is, I'm always looking where possible for what I would call a tripod contact with the board or with the ground or whatever it is you're working with. So I'm learning from them about how they create stability in what is a very kind of dynamic situation and how that foot changes based on their interaction with the board. And maybe then I can understand how better we should change and interact our foot as we move over, maybe uneven surfaces or uphills or downhills, because of course they're up going at some pretty crazy angles. So yeah, lots to learn and lots of information to swap. I did a similar, well, say similar, I had a collaboration with British Diving. So worked with British Diving in the lead up to the Olympics and just looking at how the divers have their movement on the board. Not the twirly stuff, that's all really exciting and impressive, but I just worked with them on their three steps on the board and then how they leave the board. So looking at things in minute detail, but then maybe bringing them back into running, that's something we might do tens of thousands of times in a single run.