What we don't want, the worst position you can get in is to have your arms hands low. If your hands go below your waistline my thumbs can no longer touch my waistline, through down now my hips are like this. What I have done is I have created a long lever. The lever is now from shoulder down to my wrist. It's also can be looked as a pendulum, an another way of looking it's a long pendulum. It's kind of like a grandfather clock pendulum.
In physics, the longer the pendulum is the more energy it takes to move that pendulum, and the slower it moves. As we shorten the pendulum it takes less energy to move it and we can move it faster. So we don't want the hands to drop below to the elbows. So do that, the way to check it as you are running is as you are running just see if as you are running along to check yourself, see if you can just touch your waistline with your thumb, as your hand goes by your hips. If your thumb can touch your waistline you know everything is right, so you don't look over and see where it is and all the stuff at your head, you can tell where it is. Just know where your body parts are just by touching your thumb to your waist belt or to your waistline as you go through, just touch your waist and you can see it's there.
So all we are trying to get out of the arms is just balance but we don't want to waste energy. So we will try to bring the hands up to this position, we are at the Alexander head position and we are just going to run this way, that's pretty simple. That's the easiest part of this entire thing because the upper body is really not going to do much force other than just kind of like bring in oxygen and transport it to our legs which is where the work is being done.
Now, let's go to, let's start going to lower body where all the action is taking place. Hand should be relaxed, good question. Hands should be relaxed. What I tell athletes to think about it's kind of like if you were running and you had a potato chip in each hand. Yes I want to curve little curve potato chip and you don't want to crush it by making a fist. So just kind of like he is grouping that, just barely holding that potato chip in your hands so that you are not breaking it and you can run with a very relaxed position.
There are drills we will talk about later on and when you are doing the drills, if you tend to be tight when you run like hands are clenched and shoulders are high and jaw, straighten all the stuff. What we work on doing is relaxing your fingers when you are running, when you do the drills that helps you relax your arms and your shoulders. When your hands are tighten up you begin to tighten everything else up. If your hands are relaxed, the shoulders, the neck relaxes and the other thing is to relax your face. As I call it fish face, as you are running it should be this expressionless face. The jaws moving like this as you run. You know this is little movement of your cheek, so you can feel them moving a little bit as opposed to the clenched jaw where nothing can move. So we are trying to get relaxed as we can.
Okay, now let's move to the lower body. So let's stand with your feet together. When you run by the way as we run our feet, if you run on a straight line like this line right here. Run down the straight line in the sand and then look at our footprints, what we would see is the feet -- if this is the line that we are running on, the feet are actually overlapping that line, both feet are on that line. They are like this. They are kind of overlapping the line. They are not running like this. We are not running with the line between our feet we are running with a line under our feet.
So we are going to overlap the stride as we run. So let's stand with your feet together because we are going to like simulate the body position, the half of the body position on each half of the body we are going to look at. This is the way one half of the body would look. If it was when I was running and this is the way the other half of the body would look when it's running but we are not that happen, it was sync each other by 180 degrees.
So we are like this, Alexander position, thumbs up by the waistline. Now what I wants to do is just barely bend your knees, just barely bend your knees, got it the idea. Struggle to straight again, lock your knees out. So that you can feel they are locked and then just release it. Learn to relax a little bit. We are not get down real low and we are not running with a locked out knee, it's just barely flex. So we just gone out of the locked position as all we have done. We just allow the knees unlock.
Okay, now move the weight towards the balls of your feet, so you can feel the weight on the balls of your feet. Your heels just on the ground, try it if you can do it. Just lift your heels off the ground so that you can feel that, that your heels are off the ground. You get your weight toward the balls of the feet. Okay so you can feel the weight there. Okay that position is the running position now, that's the position we are trying to get in, proud upper body. The Alexander head neutral head, thumbs at the waistline, the waist of your shorts, knees slightly flexed and the weight toward the ball of your feet.
Notice I am not trying not to get you on your toes, not trying to do that. I am just putting the weight towards the ball of your feet just your heel is still touching the ground, your heel is not off the ground. So in this position, that's what I call the spring like position. Now from that position, let's try this, and you can spring up and down with almost no effort. Okay stop, okay relax, go back and resume the position again. Knee slightly flexed. Okay now let's put your weight towards your heels back on your heels keep your knees slightly flexed. Okay now, bounce up and down.
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