Gait Retraining for Performance, Treatment & Prevention with Dr. Izzy Moore

On today's episode, gate retraining for performance, treatment and prevention. Welcome to the podcast, helping you train, rehab and run smarter. When I first started running in my 20s, I knew it would be something I'd be passionate about for the rest of my life. But unfortunately, developing injury after injury disrupted my progress and left me under trained at the start line on race day. Even with my knowledge as a physio, I still fell victim to the vicious injury cycle. And when searching for answers, struggled to decipher between common running myths and evidence-based guidance. That's what this podcast is here to help you with. So join me as a run smarter scholar and let's break the injury cycle by raising your running IQ and achieving running feats you never thought possible. Welcome back to Run Smarter Scholars. We have a throwback in time, three years in fact, to my conversation with Dr. Izzy Moore, who was probably one of the very first episodes where I interviewed to, in my eyes, one of the big wigs in terms of running research. And I would constantly come across her papers and was stoked when she agreed to come onto the podcast to discuss a paper that she'd recently released at that time. And we talk about gay retraining and uncover her expertise. This episode was released in September of 2020. And I hope you enjoy. Dr. Izzy Moore, I've been pumped to get you onto this podcast ever since we organized when we can have a time to chat. I have been following your work very closely and happy, well, I'm really pumped to dive into this content. So let's start with thanks for coming onto the podcast. Thanks, thanks for inviting me, Brody. It's great to have the opportunity to talk about research. Yeah, you're very welcome. Can we just start off with if people don't know much about you, talk about kind of what you do with your level of research and what you're working on at the moment? Yeah, sure. So I'm Dr. Izzy Moore at Cardiff Metropolitan University. I'm currently a reader in human movement and sport medicine. I did my PhD at the University of Exeter looking at economical running. So essentially trying to find out how our running technique may influence the amount of oxygen we consume and loosely how, therefore, how that makes us efficient. And then I've kind of transitioned a little bit more into looking at how we can try and change our running style and folks on not just performance but also rehabilitation or injury risk prevention. So I've transitioned into kind of gateway training and looking at how we can instruct people to change their gate and what's the most effective way to do that. So that's been my more recent research has been in that area. We've got one study we've recently published. It looks at what's the best way to cue people to change their running style. And we've got a follow-up study that I need to pull my finger out and bite as well as several other papers which have looked more of kind of economical running which came off the back of my PhD. Oh, and I heard as well that your interest with gate retraining came off the back of your own personal experiences dealing with some knee issues as well. Can you talk about that? Yeah, so I've ruptured my anterior crucialligment in both my left and my right knee. First line at age 14, the second one at age 18 and I did them playing football or soccer. They were on which country you're from. I managed to get back playing football both times but then it was during my PhD. I had kind of a significant swelling flare up if you will of my oldest knee operated knee which was about nearly 10 years old at that point. So I decided I was running on the treadmill doing a pilot study for my PhD in the lab. There was a mirror in front of me. So I kind of was like I should probably look at how I run. It's considering that's what my PhD is on. And I kind of, yeah, I had because quite a lot of typical things, I guess you could say, a lot of torso lean forwards. So I was in quite a large amounts of anterior pelvic tilt. I had almost a kind of crossover gate and very straight leg when I was hitting the ground. So it wasn't too surprised that my knee wasn't particularly happy with me. So I went through a period of I was actually doing study on barefoot running, a minimalist footwear at the time. So I just took my shoes off and then my body did what it wanted and then put my shoes back on and kind of used a similar running form and that helped me get back to running and then I kind of chose academia rather than playing a lot of football. But it has allowed me to keep running every now and then when I feel like it. So I do change up my gate a lot when I'm running to kind of offload my knees because they're clearly my weak spot in my body. So I'm used to kind of just going for one and manipulating certain elements of it depending on how my body feels that day. Yeah, and I know from my experiences as well if I've been through like similar things it tends to retain and you have a good more interest moving forward and like reading about it and helping other people with that same situation as well. So have you found the same thing? Yeah definitely and I think there were some by mechness who are very much, no, we can't change gates. It's too hard to change how someone runs. So ingrained in them. And I'm kind of whereas I'm the opposite I kind of do it every time I go for a run. It does take a lot of kind of cognitive load to do but I think over time when we practice it becomes not easier and it's certainly something that I think is useful for runners to understand a bit about and you know, so if they they are feeling slightly fatigued or a bit of pain you can either try and run through it or you can maybe alter something about what you're doing to help kind of maybe lessen the load for your run. It's very hard to do research on this kind of thing but I guess just intuitively from personal experience and speaking to other coaches and clinicians. I think this is a lot of what people advise anyway is having a few things in your toolkit when you're out running just to put variation through your body in terms of the loading patterns. I think that's a nice way forward. Yeah, I think we'll explore that a little bit more. From what I know about the research at the moment well from reading a couple of your papers and a couple of others is when someone wants to run if we have like a recreational runner, some will like, there's this thought of self-optimization like some will naturally just try and adopt a running style that's particularly efficient or economical for them based on you know their dimensions based on their like weight based on their stiffness or strength and that kind of thing. Do you have the same kind of understanding or the same reasoning with that method or do you think differently? Yeah, I think self-optimization also occurs through having greater exposure and kind of accumulating that exposure. So I think there are some that will be far better at getting closer to it and producing a gate that lowers the amount of oxygen they need. But we know that this is a really good study by Dorita and colleagues which has shown that trained runners versus untrained runners. The trained runners have a much closer to their optimal cadence and so that's the cadence that has the lowest auction cost compared to the untrained runners who are about 8% away from using the cadence that they potentially should use to lower their auction cost. So I think there's an exposure element to that optimization but I do think you know we're never going to be bang on optimal. We run, we you know you pick up injuries and so over time that optimal may shift so what is optimal when we're younger may not be the same when we're older, when strength we know declines, greater injuries stack up in our history. So it's probably a constant change going on and some people maybe better listeners of their body and their effort levels than others to achieve that optimum. Well and 8% away from the optimal is quite a lot. And I know that based on research, like you have to adjust maybe five to 10% anywhere between there to see a real change. And I guess from like a question from like what a recreational runner would look for or ask and a lot of the audience that I do have are recreational runners. So it might be my job within this interview to try and clarify a few of the terms that we do use in the bit of the jargon that's thrown out there. But if a recreational runner wants to increase their performance, which I'm assuming like a lot of runners out, they will fit a lot of runners out there myself included. Should we be consciously trying to change or correct our technique or should we constantly try and find something to improve on with our technique? Or are we just wanting just to get more exposure and then ideally over time self-optimise? Yeah, that's. I have no research kind of lean on that would point in either direction. It's more, I guess, I think some people take to changing their running style a lot better than other people. And I don't think changing your running style will ever match the kind of benefits of just doing lots and lots of running and doing a really good running training program. I think it's a way of. of you're only using it as a fine tuning kind of mechanism. So I would probably go along with the lines of getting into running first, following your running training program and then once you're in the rhythm of doing that, then you potentially look. There's a nice simple way of trying to calculate what your optimal cadence may be based on your heart rate. We've put a spreadsheet together that can help with that. So it's probably once you're kind of into running a little bit, you're kind of in your rhythm of your training, you could then kind of look to. OK, yeah, I know what my rhythm of running is. My cadence now may be a good time to just check in to see if it's as good as it could be. Some people will just never be able to change. you know, their running style. As effectively as just doing more training is for them. So there is a kind of personal preference that I think something comes down to. Yeah, I should probably clarify. Like when we're talking about cadence, we're talking about the amount of steps someone takes per minute and someone can be turning their legs over really, really quickly and taking faster, shorter steps without necessarily changing their running speed. And before we start recording, you're talking about like treadmill is a very good way of doing that. Based on what we've just discussed so far, it almost seems like we can almost assess that. It's based on like an individual. Like if an individual seems to be outside their optimal rate, then we might want to change their cadence. Just to see if they can. if they're one of those types of runners that are like intruined and can. I has like a lot of body awareness that they can make those changes and see if they feel better. And then if they do, maybe try and set them. or maybe fine tune that that's going to be a more ideal cadence for them. Whereas there might be others where you try and change their cadence to a more optimal and they particularly struggle with. like that's kind of that adjustment. And you might say for them, okay, maybe we just need a bit more experience, a bit more exposure, you know, become a bit more maybe coordinated or just slowly allow your body just to naturally take on that more economical state. Would you agree with that? Yeah, you know, we recently just put a book chat together which essentially recommends an individual assessment, like you've just said above trying to look through the literature and go, oh, well, here's the perfect running form. These elite Kenyan distant runners seem to run like this and I should do the same. We recommend kind of stepping away from that and doing, as you say, it's on an individual level and what works for that individual athlete and what works for one person isn't necessarily the answer for another person. And ultimately, there is. Yeah, we're definitely not in a place where we can say there is a perfect running form in terms of performance for distance running and I don't think that we'll ever find that because people vary so much. We know that even just between males and females, there are differences and unfortunately a lot of people don't separate the data between males and females. So we actually know very little about female distance running dates in comparison to male running gate, let alone trying to generalise across the whole of males and the whole of females. So definitely the advice for now is to focus on what works for you and an individual assessment rather than just going off what you've heard is a perfect running form. Yeah, and I think that makes sense based on how different people run and how different people are, like with their body shapes and their strength and. Have you ever struggled to find clear science-based answers for training plans or injury advice? Traditional search engines like Google and AI tools like chat GPT often prioritise unreliable sources like blogs and forums. And even when you go looking for real research papers, they can be tough to interpret. That's why I created the RunSmartter AI Assistant, available to monthly subscribers. Built on top of my years of RunSmarter content, this AI Assistant is designed to help you train, rehab and run smarter by providing evidence-based answers you can trust. Here's how it works. Ask at any question whether it's injury rehab, recovery or training advice and it will generate an answer by drawing from my podcast episodes, books and my curated database with hundreds of peer-reviewed research papers. And to prove the answers can be trusted, it will even reference the answers with clickable links to the original studies that you can view yourself. Subscribers also get unlimited access to my entire library of PDF research papers. So if you're serious about getting high-quality research-backed advice, then try the RunSmartter AI Assistant today. Just click on the link in the show notes to learn more. What sort of running goals they have. And we've kind of established that there is no perfect running form, but on the other side, is there a running trait or running style that you might see in clinic, someone running on a treadmill that displays a certain characteristic? Is there kind of like a trait that you might identify and say straight away, oh, we might need to change that? Is there any like kind of like danger traits where you're like, no, no, we need to change this. This needs to be a high priority. Not really. If I kind of get off, I've done like say a lot of recreation efforts when I've assessed their gate, they are always keen to get also what do I need to be able to run faster, run for longer. And I always see the biomechanics more as kind of fine tuning because it takes a lot to be able to change your running gate. It's not a quick fix and takes a lot of motivation on the run. It's easier to change issues, which I think is why they footwear gets a lot of publicity and it gets good marketing because it's a quick fit. And they people see it as potentially a quick fix, where it's changing your running gate isn't. But I guess if they seem to be having like very long strides, that could be something you can manipulate relatively quickly in people with a metronome. So if they're running on a treadmill, you can just set a metronome app on your phone and just get them to run in time with a beat and if you're quick in that beat up, most people can comfortably go to their cadence to a certain level. And you couldn't just see, what's their perceived effort? Well, they're doing that, what's their heart rate like? Well, they're doing that to see if there are large effects potentially going on with oxygen cost. Because we can use heart rate to some degrees. It's a bit of a surrogate measure for oxygen cost. If you're doing kind of steady state endurance running. The cadence, I guess, is a nice quick one. And when you manipulate cadence, you do manipulate quite a few things in terms of your respect to see some different ways that they'll hit the ground with their leg because you're short on their cadence. They're probably not going to be reaching out in front of them as much. So that might help lower the impact forces they experience. It can also often lower the knee forces that they experience. So for a lot of runners, with the knee being the most commonly injured, or certainly body site with the most pain in runners, that could be both maybe a performance and potentially gay retraining method for rehabilitation, kind of pain purposes as well. - Yeah, and I think when it comes to the performance side of things, if someone isn't, if it's going all over their head when we're talking about cadence, I do have a cadence episode, like it's within the first 10 episodes of the podcast, so they can go back and review that before coming back and listening to this. But this is where it ties in really nicely 'cause we're talking about performance, like any runner, or most runners want to help increase performance, and the way you can do that for a distance runner is to improve your running economy. So that's, you know, traveling at the same speed, but not using as much oxygen. And one of the ways you can measure that is measuring through your heart rate and can be a very accurate description of whether you're working, whether you're working optimal or whether you're working harder if you do change a few things. And what you're saying is, you can change your cadence up, up 5% or 10% and then readjusting just to see if there's any change in your heart rate. And if it starts to lower your heart rate, then you might be getting closer to an optimal running cadence, which leads to a more economical run, which means you're not using as much oxygen, which means you can perform better if you're traveling at that cadence. So I guess that's where it works really nicely. And this is where your Excel spreadsheet that you're talking about is really handy because you can plug in those variables and then once you know those two pieces of data of the heart rate and the cadence and correlating the two, you can tell a lot from, you know, where your ideal cadence might lie and your ideal performance. So that's really nice. That ties in really, really well. Then we'll sort of just touch on like recovery or if you are injured, what we can do. So let's dive into that a little bit more with like injury-specific kind of stuff. Once you are injured and what can we tell about like gate retraining in order to help our recovery? So yeah, there's been kind of almost explosion of gate retraining studies, most of which are focused on rehabilitation rather than prevention. And so they focused on injuries such as tubule stress structures, patellar femal pain and illiotibial band syndrome. And there's been some very nice studies conducted by a main group from American researchers which have shown it to be fairly effective at reducing pain. So whether that be through knee pain or ITB pain. And that can happen just within a couple of weeks of between six to eight sessions of gate retraining. And that running kind of newly adopted running style through that gate retraining program seems to persist for one month and three months after. So it looks like a potentially effective avenue. But again, effective for some people and not as effective as others. So we do see group level changes. But within that, there'll be variation in terms of the style that people are able to produce and also the pain reduction that they're able to feel. And if we're using these gate retraining cues, are we as runners, are we decreasing the load through the body or are we just like redistributing it to other muscles and other joints? Potentially a little bit of both, but definitely redistribution. So for example, if we're changing how someone hits the ground with their foot, so you can go from a reafer striker to a forefoot striker, we know that reafer strikers place a lot more load through the knee, whereas if you hit with a forefoot or the toes, hit the ground first, that puts a lot more load through the ankles. So for patellar femal pain, for example, there has been a study where they've looked to change the weight of the leg, and they're going to be able to do that. So they're going to be able to do that. They're going to be able to do that. And when you're talking about, because you did mention really nicely that the increasing cadence has been shown to reduce loads in the need joint, which can help things like knee pain. Because it might reduce like an overstried. Is it the same queue that's used for, like you're saying, ITB syndrome or stress fractures is that the main gateway training queue Yes, but also for tibial stress factors, they also look at the tibia acceleration. So they put an accelerometer on the tibia and you can essentially use it as a so good measure of the impact going through the tibia. And then they used real time feedback to ask people to lower their tibia acceleration. But we know that certainly again, this is a, these are studies that have only been done on males. We male runners, if we reduce their stride length and so therefore increase their cadence, their tibia acceleration is lowered. So cadence, cadence manipulations do a lot of things. And so potentially could be useful for tibial stress factors, telephone or pain for ITB syndrome. It has the potential to go a little way in helping it, but they tend to focus a lot more on trying to get your knees pointing forwards, because you tend to see with individuals with ITB syndrome, maybe a lot of hip abduction. So that their leg is kind of being drawn to the midline of their body. So what the gay training tries to do is create a bit of separation between the knees as they're running to try and get their lower limb, nice and almost straight underneath the pelvis, rather than coming across the midline of the body. Yeah, and Tom Goon talks about that really nicely talks about the knee window. And if the knees are kind of brushing together, particularly in female runners, trying to, I guess, widen that window, open that window to make sure the knees aren't touching each other. And as a result, the knees are facing a little bit more forward. And there's not as much strain on the ITB, which yeah, I found it has been a really nice cue for me personally when I'm working with runners. So going back to the stress fracture, when you're talking about the the tibial acceleration, the actual change that you are creating is increasing running cadence, but what you're saying is the effect is different, because we're not really necessarily we're not changing the over stride where more addressing how quickly the the shin is accelerating through space. Is that right? Yeah, so the main risk factor is perceived to be the tibial acceleration and one way of changing that is through cadence, but also people probably do adoptive kind of flat foot contact. Rather than going for again, out and out, heal with strike with the cues that they do and with if they use cadence, the foot will potentially come a bit flatter. And that might help decrease the acceleration of the tibial. Yeah, as they climb to the ground. Yeah, that makes sense. And so if we're redistributing, if we're making these changes and we're distributing the loads more to other areas of the body, I think that's where having like a tailored approach or having like a health professional incorporate their opinion, because we don't necessarily want the load being redistributed to an area that can't take that load. And then we're leading to other issues and for an example, like if we're adopting someone who is it was a heal strike, we're adopting more of a flat foot or a for full contact, a lot more of the load is going through the Achilles or the plan a fascia or the ankle and foot and could potentially lead to things like calf strains or Achilles tendon opathies or like like a stress fracture. Would you say that making these slight adjustments, we wanna make sure that the other joints are able to handle that load and therefore incorporating these gait retraining tips with a performance or like with a strength and conditioning program to say is warranted? - Yeah, I think that's probably a nice safe way to try and look to change your running style. And I'd also say that you don't want to go, right? I usually run my 5K run, I'm just gonna do my 5K run and it plate my cadence for the whole time. We'd suggest gradually building it in. So for a minute, I'm gonna focus on this gait retraining strategy, so I'm gonna increase my cadence for a minute and I'll go back and slow it down for another minute. And so you're kind of increasing your exposure to that different loading pattern over time. So I know a lot of runners don't like the thought of decreasing how much they're running or how far they're running. So if you don't want to change that part of your running program, you just want to change your gait. You definitely want to do it in a structured, graduated exposure way and supplementing that with some exercises that focus on different body areas, like say from a strength conditioning perspective would also be an effective way to what you don't want to do is obviously get injured because you've changed your running style. So you don't want to be doing it too quickly and with your body not able to tolerate those different nodes. That's a very good point. And it's almost like the, for what we know about like how the body adapts, we want to make sure there's not like a spike in load, we want to make sure that the body is adapting like we're not exposing the body like to greater loads that exceeds adaptation capacity. Almost similar to how someone might want to transition to a lesser lighter shoe to increase performance, we want to make sure that that transition is very gradual. And when you're referring to gait retraining or increasing a cadence, that kind of stuff, it makes sense that we can increase it in slow bouts and slowly increasing your exposure to that new cadence and that way, if it's gradually enough, the body will adapt and become more accustomed. And then it reduces the risk of any spikes in load because the body's getting stronger along the way. Is that kind of what you were referring to? Yeah, and I think it's almost as principle of variability and varying that load. So you use the example of footwear that there's a really nice study which showed that people who had man and alternated between two pairs of running shoes during their running program seem to have a lower injury risk than those who just ran in the same pair constantly. So it kind of suggests that producing different loads going through the body is a good approach because your body becomes more accustomed to the variability and perhaps has a great tolerance for a wider range of loads. And I think you can do that for you changing your footwear. You're changing the surface, the gradient and so on that you run. But you can also do that for manipulating your running gate. And these are all just ways of varying that load. And I think it's about kind of making, like say, changing that tissue tolerance and making, I guess, more of a robust runner who can accommodate those those changes that they may face. You know, running on the road and having to then run on the grass and so on and that not being detrimental to their to their body. Very good point. And I like how you say robust runner because I like to say that like an injury will arise almost at your weakest link depending on your training history and your running style, that kind of thing. And if you are subjecting your body to this variability, what you're doing is you're almost identifying the weak links and almost building up all the weak links that you might have because you might become accustomed to a certain running speed or certain type of shoe that you run in a certain terrain that you're used to. But then as soon as you deviate from that norm, that's when your weak links are exposed. But if you're continuously trying to keep the body guessing and adjusting and having a high variability in your training, then you're building up that resiliency and you're becoming a more robust runner and exposing yourself to that wide range. That's really cool. And it's really cool. You can use different running techniques as well as shoes, as well as strength training, as well as changing your terrain, as well as introducing hills and all that kind of thing in order to tick off like all these addressing all these weak links. That's a really nice way of putting it. Yeah, it's just like having it's another tool in your toolkits. And you know, for example, whenever I run downhill, I probably go to the extreme of shortening my stride length because and therefore quickly my cadence to almost know that my knee is my knees and my weak link. So there are times when it's useful to expose them and there's times when actually maybe I can do my best to to protect them to some degree, to not overexpose them. So it's definitely, you know, all of these things are good to have in that toolkit and some will find running on different surfaces. They really enjoy some will find going and getting nice, shiny, different shoes, something that they really enjoy and others will just being like to change their adapt to their running gate so it can really be individualized for the runners, not just in terms of how you change your gate, but also whether you would use gate retraining to do that or you'd use the surface or footwear to do that. Yeah, it's the benefits of having your insight and your understanding and awareness around adjusting your your running and like you said, just having a lot of tools in your toolkit. I wanted to explore the injury prevention side of things. So we've touched on performance and we've kind of touched on injury really nicely and recovery. When we're talking about performance, this could when we're talking about prevention, this could be a really easy answer for you because when I was talking to Chris Brahma on a couple of weeks ago and I talked about this, is there any like running style or anything that we can adopt to reduce risk of injury? He kind of alluded to over striding being one and there's sort of emerging evidence around a control actual hip drop or that hip reduction. So those knees getting closer together with his answer. Would you agree or would you have anything to add or would you disagree? There's certainly I think your prevention is a lot, it's a lot harder to study in terms of just the sheer numbers that you need. And so the research is as Chris kind of mentioned is emerging. It's certainly not as much that we know in comparison to doing it from a rehabilitation standpoint and just trying to reduce pain. So the cadence again, it always gets gets a nod. Although I'm not particularly aware of kind of studies that have done a prevention based study on it. I know that there's one recently that looked at reducing loading rates. So that's kind of how quickly you develop force in the impact phase. It's kind of the the mindset of Professor I mean, Davis in America, she's very keen on kind of for foot running and reducing your loading rate. And they actually found that implementing that in unchained runners, kind of at the beginning of a running program, reduce their injury rate for the next 12 months. It's the only study that's kind of done that approach of changing gate and seeing reveal prevent injuries. But again, that study comes with the caveats that it decreased the occurrence of patellar femal pain, but there was a slight increase in the currents of a Achilles tendonocphy when you look at the kind of breakdown of injuries. So which you would expect when you try and reduce your loading rate, because what typically happens is you run more on your toes and with a slightly shorter stride length from faster cadence. So there's there's always caveats to this kind of research that overall it might be effective for injury rates, but when you delve deeper into the specific injuries, It's not all in there will be no running style that can kind of decrease all injuries because the load has to go somewhere That's just the nature of running there is always a load and it's just where you where you try and distribute it The load has to go somewhere. I've just read that down good because it really illustrates this whole topic and Having such insight and having such understanding about your body and how strong your body actually is You might be making certain adjustments that addresses all your strong points But in the opposite way like you might just be making changes that you think is for the better, but you're actually Exposing more load to a weaker point or some or to a part of the body which the load can't handle and It's it's tough that the prevention side of things is so hard to study and hard to come up with a conclusion because it's the It's a question all the recreational runners that are after they're just like what can I do to reduce my risk of injury because all the runners they hate being injured, but Unfortunately, it's not as easy to come up with an answer So I guess what the to summarize the the prevention side of things is there are ways that we can apply Some different running techniques to an individual but in order to prevent injury, but it's just that tailored advice Based on like sound science and sound advice is it might be required This is finding that tailored advice for the individual is where we might have the problem Yeah, yeah, definitely it's it's certainly an area that needs more research in it, but And it's kind of it's probably why I focus on the rehabilitation side of things I'm I'm much more comfortable saying okay, you've you've got pain or let from my Bimer clinical knowledge and my anatomical knowledge This might be a useful strategy But it's so hard to predict if someone will get an injury get an injury that I kind of almost shy away from Changing gate too much if they don't have an injury Because you know maybe at least based on how they're running and what they're doing currently They're okay And there's always that possibility some people go I've gonna change my gate now and I'm just gonna keep running the same amount And they'll get injured as a result of that. So it's always a bit of a tricky one But definitely the kind of individual approach and trying to take it as much as possible by knowing that They're running history their training program and Supplementing that with a popular exercises or with the gate changes Understanding their footwear understanding what terrain they run on you kind of need all of these factors I think to to really start grappling with what is the best thing to target for prevention Because it may be that their running style isn't the thing that you need to target It's just their training program or just getting them onto a different surface rather than tweaking their gate So it's not that this doesn't always need to be the answer to change their running style. Yeah And I'm glad you said that because it's all about becoming a smart runner and making smarter terrain decisions and having more Awareness around if you do make slight changes what affect that has on the body and If there's kind of two main things to take away from this it was it's kind of to Build on your knowledge around what certain effects have and what certain changes have and making those smarter Decisions, there's that side of things and then the other take-home message that I really like is while you're talking about with variability and making sure you have a wide range of all like you're exposing yourself to a wide range of different forces and different Surfaces and different environments in order to become a robust runner and a more resilient runner As we wrap up here, is there any other take-home messages that we haven't necessarily discussed that you want The recreational runner or the audience to take away? I guess you know one thing if you do try and look in to get retraining Don't don't think you need to come up with very fancy fancy cues To do that, you know often just telling someone We want you to run for foot. We want you to increase your cadence And just being very explicit with a kind of clear instruction You know research showing that that's more effective. I think some people trying, you know come up with very bizarre analogies and Cues that people don't really know how to interpret so keep it simple would be my advice Great and as a runner if you are looking to try and adjust your cadence one of my Tips were just to be like we were talking about before just running on a treadmill because If you haven't worked on increasing your cadence before in the past a lot of people just naturally speed up And then they're getting out of breath and you know, they're not too sure what's going on but the treadmill Is a way that to know that you're traveling at the same speed and then if you're adjusting your cadence or maybe Just like a metronome just having a beat and just stepping to that rhythm Can be a really nice Environment to try and train or change up your cadence to see how you feel would you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely definitely if suddenly if you're not not used to changing cadence or knowing the kind of speed You know inherently that you're running at treadmills are a really effective way of Manipulating cadence So what we always use in research so that we don't have so we can control the speed and as many things as possible So it's definitely the place I'd start Yeah, very cool Dr Izzy Moore if people love and what you're saying and want to learn more about you is there anywhere else they can go to Reach out or just see what you're publishing or what you're posting any social media anything else if people want to follow you Yeah, I'm on Twitter. There's any any social media I have so I'm Izzy Moore PhD on Twitter Fantastic I'll add that in the show notes Um we'll finish up there. Uh, uh, this has been extremely fascinating for me and I'm sure the audience would agree Thanks for taking your time to to come on and share your knowledge and a big thanks to you so much for like all you do for the running research and people like me who want to know Where the research is leading and I do deep dives into Like publications all the time and your name constantly pops up so Personally, I want to say a big thanks to all the work that you've been doing If you are struggling to overcome an injury you can jump on a free 20-minute injury chat with me Which you can book through my calendar in the show notes while you're in the show notes elevate your running IQ by jumping onto my free email list so you can receive material to help rehab your injury lower your injury risk and increase your performance If emails aren't for you consider my Facebook group, Instagram and YouTube channels and remember each inside you get from these resources brings you one step closer to your next running breakthrough [Music]