The Official RunDot Podcast 2025 Holiday Gift Guide

Welcome

Carrie Tollefson: Welcome everybody to the RunDot podcast. Today we have famous Run coach on the show to teach us the four pillars of run form. The legendary coach we are talking to is Bobby McGee. Bobby has been a run coach for over 40 years, working with everything from high school athletes to Olympic medalists and world champions. I'm Carrie Tollefson, Olympian, broadcaster and your guide to the world of RunDots. We treat the show like any good workout. We'll start with our warmup question, settle into the main set conversation and then wind things down by having coach Bobby answer an audience question on the Cool Down. Lots of good stuff, so let's get after it.

Announcer: This is the RunDot podcast, the running show that brings you world class coaching with every conversation. Let's get started with today's warm up.

Warm Up Question

Carrie Tollefson: All right, Bobby, for our warm up question day, we want to ask you what is the coolest, coolest place you've ever gone for a run in? Whether that's a city or a country or wherever it is. But what's the coolest? And we're not talking about temperature, we're talking about the coolest, like in the most awesome place you've run.

Bobby McGee: Yep, that would be interesting to me. I think I would probably go with three of them. The one would be in a place called the Roof of Africa, which is in the country of Lesotho. And it's pretty much up there around about 3,000 meters. And it is just really like being on the Roof of Africa. It was just spectacular. So that was one, I think the other, the second one would be on a property that I used to own in South Africa where if you stood in the middle of this property, you could see all the way inland. You could see Table Mountain and you could see all the way up the west coast of Southern Africa. And that mountain is called Pardonbach, which means the mountain of the horses. And way back it had those now extinct zebras that used to live on that mountain. And so that was a pretty spectacular place for me as well. And again, it's hard to just even. I've chosen three. Right. I've run in some pretty amazing places. I think number three would be in the country now known, known as Namibia, which is on the west coast, the southwest coast of South Africa. I did a little talent identification series of trips there where I would go to a local airfield and I would get all the locals kids to show up and they'd run a 5K and we'd just see what they were up against. And one of those runners actually ended up getting Silver in the World Championship Marathon. His name was Lukette Swatboy. Anyway, the last day I was there, I had to fly back to the US and it was winter in the US but it was high summer there in Namibia. Right. And I had a pair of ripstop nylon shorts on and I had a tech T shirt on, and I had, I think I had an Ironman Timex watch on and I had a running cap of some sort on and some good shoes. And by the time I got back from that run, I only had my shorts on because all of the locals ran with me and they wanted things. I gave my hat and my shirt and my watch and my socks and my shoes. My. By the time I got home, I was barefoot just with my shorts on. So that was a pretty spectacular run.

Carrie Tollefson: That sounds like Kipchoge at the Paris Olympics in the marathon when he ended up dropping out. But everyone wanted his shirt or everyone wanted his hat or whatever it was. He ended up, I think, having just his shorts on as well.

Bobby McGee: Except I was maybe two minutes a mile slower than that at that point.

Carrie Tollefson: Oh, I love it. Yeah. You've traveled the world, obviously. Lived all over the world. And I think for me, I loved being in Japan. I raced at a couple different races over there, but we were there for world cross country one year. And the cherry blossoms, like, I mean, they were literally just, you know, they would stop you in your tracks. They were so beautiful. And so that was one. I loved being in Zurich and Stockholm. I thought those two were beautiful cities. But you know that Gwen Jorgensen used to train with me a little bit here in the Twin Cities area. And I'm partial to this. This beautiful state that I live in. Yes, it is very cold, so it's not. I'm not talking cool that way. I'm talking about it is beautiful. Especially in the fall and especially when Gwen was here training with me a little bit. It was just the colors were so spectacular and I think I just like being home. So pretty fun stuff, though.

Bobby McGee: Yeah, fantastic. Did you ever run that 4 miler in Chicago? Not, not in Chicago, but in Illinois in. What's the name of the town in Steamboat?

Carrie Tollefson: Oh, I haven't run Steamboat, but I've heard it's a really quaint city.

Bobby McGee: Exactly. And the day after Steamboat, there's a run called the Boredom Run. Oh, and. And, and it's fantastic. I know it's hardly boring, but that kind of reminds me of the kind of running you talk about when. When you're running in the middle, you know, so.

Carrie Tollefson: Yeah, it's just, it is gorgeous at certain points, but in the middle of the winter, I don't think so. I see why Gwen would go over and train overseas, that's for sure. Well, cool. Well, hey, audience, we want you to answer our question as well. So check it all out on our RunDot social media accounts. We want to hear from you. And please find us on all of our socials as well. Okay, let's go to the main set.

Bobby McGee: Let's go.

Main Set - Run Form Discussion

Carrie Tollefson: Improving your run form does not happen by accident, and you know this better than anybody. So we want to talk about run form today and we're going to dig all into your new program. But first off, I want to just talk a little bit about your incredible journey through this sport you've been around for. You said, I think before we started recording, 45 years coaching in this world of run and in all sorts of endurance sports, actually. But let's just talk a little bit about your background and what got you into coaching.

Bobby McGee: You know, this is quite an oft repeated story, but when I was graduating high school and I graduated young, not because I just went to school when I was five, my father said, and we were, in those days in South Africa, you were conscripted into the military. So I had, you know, four years of military training ahead of me. And my father knew that if I went to, to the army first and did my military service, I wouldn't go to college. So he insisted that I go to college first. And the military accommodated that you could go to the, to do, do your studying first. And he said, so what do you want to study? And I said, I have no idea. And he said, well, what's your favorite thing? And I said, sport, you know. And I was a bit of a runner and a bit of a field hockey player. The highest level I reached was field hockey. And he said, well, you know, are you good enough to, you know, become an athlete of some sort? And I said, nah, I'm not going to make it as an athlete, but I'd like to be a coach. And the only pathway during those apartheid years was to become a schoolteacher because school teachers did all the coaching in high school and cross country, right? And so I, I said, you know, I'm going to just study phys ed, which would, which was called Human Movement studies in those days, and do another major as well. I did English literature, but that was what got me. I wanted to be a coach from already age 17, probably. And so by the time 86 rolled around, I'd been teaching for a couple of years. I was coaching high school cross country, I was coaching high school track. I said, you know, I need to know more. And then I went back to college to do post grad work on sports psychology and on, on perceptual motor aspects. So basically neurological aspects of sport, huh?

Carrie Tollefson: I mean, you really like the science side of things. And, and that's kind of interesting because you and the founder of RunDot, Jeff Booer, who was just on the RunDot podcast a few weeks ago, you guys can kind of geek out, for lack of better terms over all of that stuff. Tell us a little bit about your history with Jeff.

Bobby McGee: I think Jeff was a. Had a, a junior triathlon team for, for a number of years. And I used to work for USA Triathlon and we used to go to all these key junior meetings during the selection process of getting juniors to, to nationals as well as getting them to the world championships. And I would drift around amongst all the coaches and Jeff was a bit of a rose amongst a bit of a thorn amongst the roses because many of the top coaches were females and still are. And so, you know, that's where we got together and started speaking about stuff. And he was always techie and I think right in the end we started kind of challenges were. Some part of his passion was swimming. Right. So what are the technical challenges of swimming? And I've always been fascinated by the technical challenges of running and the very different nature of those two sports in terms of movement patterns and how you acquire those movement skills and stuff like that. So I think that was our connection point with that.

Carrie Tollefson: I want to know. In the world of running, a lot of people don't know if they should mess with their form. And you've studied this, now you have this program. You know, people think that we should just naturally let our bodies move the way it feels. Right? All of those things. But I want to know a little bit. Do you think that over time our, if we work on our run form, it actually can improve?

Can Run Form Be Improved?

Bobby McGee: Absolutely. Utterly. It can improve. But here's the thing. It took physical therapy research a very short period of time to realize running a certain way causes a certain injury. So with an individual, it causes a certain injury. If you stop them from doing it that way they won't re injure themselves. And that was the understanding of why you worked on run form. You worked on run form so you wouldn't get hurt or you wouldn't get reinjured. All right, so you take something simple like Dina, right? Dina Caster. When I measured her cadence at the Sacramento Olympic trials for Beijing. Oh, okay. So two, 2004. Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: Oh, that was for Athens, because that's the one I won.

Bobby McGee: Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: So going. Going to Athens. Yeah.

Bobby McGee: Yep. So for the Sydney ones, her cadence, she was trying to run the 10,000 in Sydney, I think, and then in Athens, she went to the marathon. Right?

Carrie Tollefson: Marathon, you're right. Yeah.

Bobby McGee: The whole, the whole Jovi Hill connection and all that sort of stuff. But her cadence was. In those days, we used to talk single leg. So her cadence was like 98. All right, so that's 100 and what's that? 196 or something? Yeah. And somewhere along the line, I heard Joe saying, you know, she needs to do 120 miles a week, otherwise she's not going to make it in the marathon. And she's saying to Joe, I can't do 120 miles a week. I start breaking down. 95, 96 miles a week. Right. And then somewhere along. And I counted her cadence in the 10,000 meter at the trials in Sacramento. So I knew that. Right. And then she went through a block where she did really, really short hills and things in this lead up to Athens, you know, transitioning to the marathon. And then all of a sudden she was capable of doing way more mileage. And then I saw a long piece of video of her running, some. Some documentary type thing, and I went, oh, my God, her cadence is now way up. And I made the connection that if she's going way up, ground contact time will be lower. She's beating herself up less. She's managing mileage now. She's still in Athens. Right. Which. Which she does get. So that kind of thinking, to answer your question, is yes, we know that messing with people's mechanics, if they are off, if they are too asymmetrical, if they are too imbalanced, if the ground contact time is too high, if the stride length is too long or too short, when they trying to achieve a certain velocity and they just can't go beyond that, et cetera, et cetera, you can change their mechanics over time and they don't get injured. Right. But of course, what happens when you don't get injured is you get more consistent. And when you get more consistent, you get better. Right. So nobody put together that working on mechanics can lead to performance. But then finally somebody released a study and said, if you do this, then this happens to your speed. If you do this, then this happens to your duration at velocity. So your, your 10k speed can now become your 10 miles speed because you messed with your components, you know. But in this creation of run form, it is definitely not a question of, I don't like your swim stroke, let's retool your swim stroke. I don't like your pedal mechanics, let's retool your petting mechanics. I don't like your backhand, let's retool your backhand. It doesn't work like that in running. And the example I always use is, is that, and this comes from our perceptual motor days, is that every sport other than running, including race walking obviously is a second language sport. It is something that we learned to play, we learned to do. Everybody remembers their first bicycle, everybody remembers their first swim teacher or the first time they did a meet or whatever in the pool. Nobody remembers their first run. All right, and so running is not learned the same way with, even within, even with a gestalt approach. Right. It's not learned the same way. So from that perspective, yes, do not mess with your running. Don't say, okay, you're a heel striker, you need to go to a midfoot striker. And this is how you do that, That's a disaster. But if you work on range of motion and if you work on rhythm and if you work on balance and you work on finding out why people run the way they do, that is hurting them. And you remove that thing, you don't add anything, you remove stuff that's leading to problems. And that to me is what working on somebody's running mechanics is. You don't teach them that a style, you don't teach them a form. You get them back to 14 years old, how they would have run then at their best, without injuries, without phones, without sitting down, without jobs, without whatever. And that's, that's what I do. So instead of giving some people some gold, I don't, I reach inside and I shake off everything that isn't gold and then I leave the gold behind, which they had in the first place.

Carrie Tollefson: Which is cool, a cool way for you to explain it, because I don't run the same as someone next to me. I mean, we all run differently. And you're not trying to make us fit into one box. You're trying to let us be who we are, but get the best out of ourselves. And you have this new program that is called run form and it's a 12 week program. So tell us how that will help us individually and not just say, okay, you know, there's 10 of us and we're all going to learn how to run the exact same way.

The 12-Week RunForm Program

Bobby McGee: No, that would be a disaster with, with your long legs and your short torso. Trying to teach another athlete with short legs and a long torso who's a great swimmer and trying to have you two run the same would be disaster city. So, yeah, the idea with run form is, is that I never met anybody of any level who wanted me to take a look at their run form, that I couldn't find something that was quite a large aha moment for them. And so myself and Matt Pendolo, who's a premier strength and conditioning coach from Reno, Nevada and has worked with a lot of world class athletes and had taken his specialty approach with strength and conditioning from the best protagonists in the world and then turned it into what do we need for endurance athletes? And it was roughly at the same time when a lot of those influencers started realizing that distance runners and endurance athletes don't need more muscle endurance work in the gym. They need sheer power, they need sheer strength. They need to pick up heavy weights, less than picking up light little weights and repeatedly. And we decided to try and create something close to what we would provide an individual that worked with us for a very long time. So that was a Flora Duffy that employed me to work with her before her gold medal in, in, in Tokyo or whether that was a Gwen Jorgensen before her gold. I would work with them individually on their things and for a long time, right. Not just 12 weeks, but the idea was to condense those four aspects which I'll. Which I'll discuss shortly, so that if people did those, they would form the very heart and the basis. There were a lot of drills that I've stuck in the world of track and field that are absolutely ideal but never permutated over to the world of triathlon. All right. And triathlons not having that advantage that runners have, right, which is if you run progressively enough, you will get there. So I wouldn't mess with in those days when I was really buckling down on it, it was, you know, it was the Ethiopian men, Bekele and those guys that I was really fascinated with. And I saw things that they did wrong but that they overcame in different ways. Right. So the Kenyans had the low knee lift, but they had the big back kick. So they were suspect in the finishing sprint just because they couldn't handle somebody close behind them. They'd fall a lot, right. Whereas the Ethiopians were built more like Europeans and they had more of a piston up and down, high cadence run. And they were Much, much quicker on the acceleration than the Kenyans were. And so I started saying, every one of us has one of those things from both the health side and a performance side. How do we clone ourselves, Matt and myself, and make ourselves available to a larger audience? Right. And we came up with this idea in pretty short order. I think Matt's been at this for close to 30 years already and myself 45 years. So we had a lot of experience in that world working at high levels. And so we decided create a 12 week program forever. If you can do that, 12 weeks, and then you take out of those 12 weeks the 60, 70% of that work that works for you. And the 12 weeks is incredibly conservative. The first four or five weeks are like super easy, but the last three weeks are very repetitive and they are at the highest level. So if you find what you need in those, if you get to that point and you do those last three weeks, that will become your protocol for your career. All right, so that was the idea with that. And then the other thing was, is I work closely with Stride, which is an amazing company that do the power meters for running. And each iteration has become more and more fascinating as they moved from a physiological model so that they would be the same as everything else, Garmin and everything else, to a model where you can dive deeply into the objective data of mechanical efficiency as opposed to cardiovascular efficiency. And that was the hallmark. So what can we do that organically improves cadence? And I'm saying improve cadence, which means it can go up or down in most cases, you want it to go up, right? And then what could you do that could reduce ground contact time? What could you do that would increase leg spring stiffness? What could you do that would optimize range of motion? And years ago, from a world class hurdles coach in South Africa, her name was Rita, I learned track and field hurdler sprinter drills. And I realized that this is what distance runners need, right? Especially now that we are in the world that somebody has run sub 50 in the last 400 over 5,000. Yeah, that's real. That's real running, right? I mean, that's world class for a woman to run sub 50. Right? And so the male can run 11 and a half laps and then crank out a sub 50. We need to do more than tempo runs. We need to find out how to run fast.

Pillar 1: Banded Dynamics

The first thing we designed then was called Banded Dynamics, which was, okay, this needs to be accessible to everybody, but it has to follow the principles of strength, range of motion and power. So with a series of exercises with bands. We bring the runner up to speed initially so that they start developing balance, power, mobility, explosiveness, and the ability to stabilize and hold their body in line. So you who have watched a thousand runners will see both who's a good runner and who's a bad runner. Even though from a symmetry aesthetic standpoint, they don't look great, but where the rubber meets the road, you can see straight away they brilliant. Right. But not a lot of people can do that. They can do that with swimming and they can do that with cycling. But it's really hard to look at a runner that doesn't look very comfortable, right. And say that's a good runner or a bad runner. Right. You can only look at their results and say, you know, they look like, you know, a drowning crab, but they, they running 250 A K, you know, so that, that was the first thing we did. Right. So that's a series of exercises using bands very clearly laid out. Start at the beginning, assess, and then progress through those things.

Pillar 2: Dynamic Mobility Drills

Then reasonably late in my career, I discovered that dynamic mobility drills are a hell of a good diagnostic tool.

Carrie Tollefson: And tell me what those are because some people might not understand.

Bobby McGee: Yes, of course, of course. Yours, by the way, were amazing just watching you doing your drills. Yeah. So dynamic mobility drills are a functional way of dynamically mobilizing your body to run effectively. Right. So if you're doing 10 minute mile warm up and your workout is going to be at 8 minute mile pace, right. This is to take your joints and your muscles and your firing sequences and your coordination and your balance from 10 minute pace to 8 minute pace without reaching beyond your capability. All right. So it's mobilization and it comes out of the research that, that's been around for a long time now that static stretching destabilizes joints. So if you, you know, if you're reaching down to, to touch your toes and you're holding that stretch, your hip is now unstable, more unstable at the end of that exercise than it was before. And it comes from that concept that running requires optimal range of motion. And I don't know if you know this, there was a great study done with Division 1 cross country runners where they just did a sit and reach test, which is not a great hamstring test, but it is a test, right. And there was a direct correlation with the athletes that had the poorest numbers and were highest ranked in the team. And These were Division 1 cross country runners. And those ones with the shortest hamstrings were the best runners.

Carrie Tollefson: I used to lay down on the ground, Coach. I would lay down on the ground, and then I would push in as fast as I could and hold, and then I'd let it go.

Bobby McGee: I was so bad at that, you see. So that's the whole idea, you saying I'm so bad at that. But that was one of the reasons why you were an Olympic runner, is because your hamstrings would not allow your shank to get ahead. It would start decelerating you with this bent knee, and then you could drive it down. I once worked with a gal from India who had grown up in a family that did yoga. And she was unbelievably mobile, and she was a fine little swimmer, and she was just fine on the bike. She just couldn't generate any spring on the run. She was just like Gumby out there on the run. Every time she put her foot down, all the energy would dissipate and she would have to gather herself and use strength to get off the ground again. You can be. It's way better to be inflexible as a runner than to be too flexible.

Carrie Tollefson: That's like music to my ears.

Bobby McGee: Yep, it's. It's crazy. I mean, the place where they did the research was with golfers. They used to have golf. They used to have massage therapists before golf tournament, and they'd stretch the golfers and they increase their mobility and everything. All right. Just to jump ahead. Now they all go into the gym and lift heavy weights before they play a tournament. Right. But in those days, you used to stretch. And they found out they lost up to 10 miles an hour in their swing speed from before stretching to after stretching. They had no ability to load because they just keep going, keep going because they were too supple to play golf.

Carrie Tollefson: I mean, it makes sense. Definitely makes sense.

Bobby McGee: So through the dynamic mobility drills, and you know, you can go to any high school on any weekend and you can see a coach giving dynamic mobility drills. And it's a travesty because then they don't understand why you do scoops or why you do a skips or why you do asymmetric arm swings or why you do kick outs. They don't understand why you do them. And they are thinking lengthening when they should be thinking firing and coordinating. All right, so dynamic mobility drills are very simple in the program, but very comprehensive. And we go into a lot of detail with. With world class models who demonstrate that. And those models are working with me for the first time and with Matt for the first time. So they make mistakes. And then you see during the course of that, with instruction and guidance and tactile guidance, which is also hard for coaches nowadays. Right. You just see that athlete just get better and better and better. Right. So that's the dynamic mobility drills. Then the third thing is.

Carrie Tollefson: Yep. So these are four pillars you're talking about. We've talked about banded dynamics.

Bobby McGee: Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: Then we've talked now about dynamic mobility drills. And then we got two more to go. So let's hear the next one.

Pillar 3: Form Drills

Bobby McGee: Exactly. So number three is form drills, which is different to dynamic mobility drills. Dynamic mobility drills will improve your form, but the idea is preparatory and diagnostic. So if you can't do something, or something is asymmetrical or something, now, you know, you. I need to go to the pt, I need to go to the massage therapist. I need to go to dance class, because I've got no rhythm, I've got no balance or whatever the case might be. But when it comes to form drills, it's things that now address the lack of running skill. So, funnily enough, one of the things that got the most hits for me on social media was that concept of do a standing high knee drill. And you notice the cadence is slow, and the athletes are working super hard at trying to get their knees up. Then I say, I want you to do the same thing, but I just want to get your feet down on the ground really quickly. And the cadence goes through the roof. And now they. And they're not realizing that the contralateral movement is making the knee come up. But it's not part of the primary conscious decision. The primary conscious decision is down, which is stiffening, which is loading, which is maintaining height, which is not losing, not excessive vertical oscillation, et cetera, et cetera. And then you. And it's softer, and it's quick, quieter, and it's easier. And people start realizing, oh, my goodness, I thought running was about getting your legs up and about lifting your knees up in front of you. And it's not. Right. It's the opposite way around. So these drills are skills drills. So if somebody's landing on the ground and their shin is leaning backwards, whether they are midfoot striker or a heel striker. Right. And their shin is leaning backwards. They're getting their foot to the ground too slowly with their knee to extend it right. When they get to the bottom. So what do they need? They need an A skip, which teaches them down and down and down in a limb isolated fashion so they can disengage from the external extensor Cross reflex, which is a running motion, which is automatic. And they're just thinking of this leg and then this leg, so they learning that skill so they're not trying to run like that. That drill leaves them with, oh, this is way more effective if I just dab down when I'm running, as opposed to thinking of trying to lift myself up in the air. So that's what run drills is about. It's about symmetry. It's about leg spring stiffness, it's about stiffening your legs, it's about linearity, it's about keeping a line. People understanding how the arm should work, understanding how you know what elbow angle should be doing and how those should occur naturally. The end of those run drills is a drill that I call the Goldilocks drill, which addresses the three main creators of cadence. Right. Which is one posture. And we could have a two hour discussion about running posture because there's so much misunderstanding about over rotation and forward lean and too much and too little and all that kind of stuff. But the first part of that drill is about posture. The second part of that drill is about kinetic chain. That what, what your wrist does, your opposite ankle does, what your elbow does, your opposite knee does, what your shoulder does, your opposite hip does. So that people start realizing, oh, wait a minute, my brain is not fast enough to correct these things. But if I shorten levers one time, all of this falls in line. And my running motion doesn't go above my SI joint. It all happens in my lumbar spine. If I don't bring it to my brain, I'm good. As soon as my brain is involved, my running falls apart, my efficiency goes, my oxygen consumption goes, all of those things. So that's what run drills is about, is habituating the feelings, the neuromuscular feelings of what good running form is. So that when you run and it is there available, it's the creating of pathways without trying to stick. Man, run.

Carrie Tollefson: It's like when my coach used to say, turn your brain off and just run. And obviously you're trying to teach us in our dynamic mobility drills how to do it, but then in those form drills, you want it to come naturally once we learn it.

Bobby McGee: Yep. In golf, there's an institute called the TPI Titles Performance Institute. And they figured out why golfers are not getting any better is they cannot get their bodies into the position that they are required to get into to get better. They're doing the best they can. So the whole concept there is the same as what is in run form so with the mobility it teaches you, if you're not sufficiently mobile, you have to run only with your quads. You can't use your glutes. Glute usage is a mobility thing. And in triathlon, it's huge because people cannot extend their femurs behind their pelvis. They can't do that because they sit in that shortened position under load for hours and hours on the bike. So they end up all being quad dominant runners, or what we call running with your butt in a bucket. All right? And it's only because they don't have the range of motion. And so all these things tie in nicely. And that's the beauty of Runform. Your brain gets to switch off. Follow the video, do the exercises for a small little investment. Get yourself some bands, get yourself an area and an environment that you can work on these things. And then use your, whatever you're using to get your biomechanical numbers. And stride is fantastic. Look at what your cadence is, look at what your vertical oscillation is. Look at what your stride length is. Look at what your leg spring stiffness is. Look at what your form power is. All these things are indicators of mechanical efficiency. And watch those numbers get tighter and closer to where you want them to be just by doing round four. And number four.

Carrie Tollefson: Yep.

Pillar 4: Loaded Mobility

Bobby McGee: Is number four the ever present question about how should I stretch, when should I stretch, Should I stretch? All right. And we decided to call this loaded mobility, all right? Yeah. And it's not a secret. The strength and conditioning coaches and so on have known for a long time. So loaded mobility is as opposed to using gravity or body weight or effort in the antagonistic muscles to lengthen the prime movers, like touching your toes, right? You're using your abs, you're using gravity and your upper body to lean down to touch your toes so that your hamstrings are forced to let go. Right? In our muscles, we have little devices called Golgi tendon apparatus. And these Golgi tendon apparatus are to protect your muscles and your joints. So if a muscle is getting too long too quickly, this little sensor inside your muscle makes that muscle fire, saying, no, if you go to end range, you're going to damage this muscle. So it makes the muscle fire so that it doesn't get too extended out and something tears or something breaks. Okay? So when you're doing loaded mobility, you going slowly, you are using the muscle itself to control its own lengthening. All right? So in that lengthening, it's now making a conscious control decision to Let the fibers relax. So that's what loaded mobility is. So it's some of the exercise quite simple. So like reverse Nordic curls. Right. So you're kneeling down and you're keeping your hips on top of your knees. Exactly. And you're leaning back slowly as far as you can go. Right. So that's a loaded mobility drill for your rectus femoris and for your quads. Okay. And this explains this. Yep. And what Matt and I have done, we put in intermediate stuff. So if you have an exercise that's a essential but very difficult to do straight out the box if you've never done it, there are resources in the program where you can say, look, if you can't do this, go here, start here. Like eccentric. Yeah, like eccentric. Solius releases. So critical for runners. Right. And so critical for triathletes. But the first time you do it, it's damn scary because not a lot of people know how to release their soleus when their knee is bent and they floating out in space, which is what they need when they're running at any time. So we start off bilaterally. So you use both feet, then you've got a tennis ball between your heels and that kind of thing. So the timing and the sets and the way to lay it out is all put in that program. So those are the four stages. And we challenge people to have a very good idea going in what their numbers and capabilities, abilities are from a mechanical efficiency standpoint. They will get faster, right, they will get more efficient, but they need to go and measure that, you know, and we know that from the current research is all over that. Right. That we can get away with pretty much most marathon runners can get away with not doing long runs by doing muscle endurance type work, by doing walking, by doing hiking, by breaking up their long runs so that they can just get more work done, which makes them a better marathon run at the end of the day as opposed to detraining for three days after a long run because they can't move. You know, I'm speaking to real people like me, not people like you.

Program Details

Carrie Tollefson: I don't know. I mean, it's the truth. You know, there's times when we couldn't move for a few days too. And you kind of wonder, well, maybe we went too far. But we need experts like you to tell us that we don't need to necessarily do that with your RunForm program, are there. There's videos, there's paperwork I'm sure that you sent. How do you. What, how does it work?

Bobby McGee: Yeah, it's, it's, it's on a platform which is pretty well respected platform called Kajabi. And when you buy the platform, you can either buy, buy it from pandola project.com or from bobbymcgee.com, both of them have access to the program. And if you get it through those, you get the entire program laid out, plus some bonuses and stuff like that. And you will get a PDF if you want one that lists everything and the sequences and the sets. But it's mostly driven as individual videos and each, each video takes you through that and over time it'll help remind you on the PDF it's just this drill. You don't have to go back and look at the video. You know what it is. But it's pretty much a lifetime access to the program. You're going, I haven't done these in a while. What is that? And so on. So it's pretty simply laid out and it's very conservatively progressed. We made sure that every age group could do that quite comfortably.

Carrie Tollefson: Well, that's what I was going to ask you because I mean, I'm looking at, you know, for instance, we've got young athletes in my house and I always say Ruby has grown, my daughter has grown so much in the last two years. Like she's taller than me now, but has like, it's just off the charts how much she's grown. And she looks like she's salsa dancing a lot of the times when she's out in the cross country course, especially as she gets to, you know, in the middle of the race when she starts to fatigue. And so those are the things where I'm like, I wonder if something like this would be really good for her to learn proper form, to learn how to kind of use the body that she has now, which is a new body. But maybe, I don't know, what would you say, Would you say let an athlete fully grow and before we start or do you start young athletes with something like run?

Who Should Use RunForm?

Bobby McGee: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Now the research is clear. Remember we used to believe that young athletes shouldn't do heavy weights, they shouldn't do this, they shouldn't do. It's all been research driven, discounted. They need to work as hard as they can now. And what happens in the US model and what I recall from how we used to do it as a high school coach in South Africa is we specialize too soon. And we have been brought into this model that most athletes will achieve tremendous success if they just consistently do the volume. And when they get to the very top of the pile, and you see it in the US a lot, these kids are fit, they are capable, they can run the pace, they just can't kick, they just can't run championship races, they just can't surge. They can't handle any of those things. Right. So now there's physiological training methodologies that need to be worked on. Potassium pump training, VO2 kinetics, that kind of thing, which is slowly getting through into that marketplace. All right. But the big thing is, is they need to be athletes first. The hardest thing for me when I first joined triathlon in the US in 2002 was that all of these triathletes were coming to Olympic triathlon from Division 1 swimming programs. You were taking people that were meeting the demands of competition in the pool, knowing that they were strong enough to ride the bike, given two or three years of riding on the bike. And then they would be running 42 minutes for 10K. And you would do a grand job with an adult of 23 years old getting them to 35 or 36. But that wasn't where the game was. The game was 33. And so then we changed the model, right. And we had to go to runners who swam in high school because that's an early development sport. Right. So running should be a late development sport. Right. You should actually only be starting to push LT type stuff, probably around 1314 earliest. But you can do plyo and you can do drills and you can do explosive stuff and you can play soccer and Frisbee and those things make them great distance runners. Athletic, balanced, assertive, fast, explosive distance runners. If you can do endurance till you're 40, yeah. You can only sprint till you're 26, maybe. Yeah.

Carrie Tollefson: Oh, you got me fired up. Like, I just think of the. My kids now, like, the future's so bright. Like if we could just, you know, they love to play. And I think this is so good for people that, like my daughter Ruby wants to maybe stop doing her Nordic skiing. But then if she does that, I have to figure out what she's going to do because she doesn't want to go to the basketball court. But you're. I think it's really good for her to hear you say being, oh, an athlete, being a well rounded person early on is. And then even like now as I get older and mature, I want to hear what you have to say about that too. Because I'm not trying to run fast anymore, necessarily, but still going out and doing something like run form is critical for someone that's getting older as well.

Bobby McGee: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that again, as you saying, Nordic skiing, it's all engine and no impact. Those are the cardiovascularly, the fittest athletes on the planet. Right. So I get an Olympic trial swimmer. All right. And they're going to run their lower limb into oblivion because they've got the engine to do that. But they all engine V8 engines built on toilet doors. My job is to reinforce the toilet door and turn it into a stainless steel door capable of handling that engine.

Carrie Tollefson: I love your examples. They're so good. Yeah, that's. That's the issue. My daughter doesn't know how to ski and she's got an engine, so that's why it's frustrating for her. She's out there laughing because she can't ski. She can't keep up with herself. So. Yeah. Okay. So really, you recommend this program for everyone? It's not just the elitist of the elite athletes.

Bobby McGee: Totally. And nobody is going to look like anything other than the best runner. They are. They're not going to learn how to dance Swan Lake versus some director's version of what a ballerina should look like? No. They're going to be their own hero, but they just going to feel better. I don't know if you've had this experience, but I used to have it all the time. Right. Somebody come to me. I teach them dynamic mobility drills. And they'd say to me the next day, I'm so sore from doing those things. They didn't seem so hard at the time. And then a couple of weeks later, maybe a month later, they'll say, wow, I'm so much better in the first two reps of my workout when I do these drills. And then after three months, I can't train without dynamic mobility. I just. It's a waste of time. And that's the experience that people get. They just feel better. And then their friends, their coaches, their spouses will recognize. You just look great on the run. You just look so peppy, so rhythmic, so linear. You know, all of those things. Just saw an interesting thing on. On social media. I think it was the. The lad that won Sydney Marathon might have been Sydney.

Carrie Tollefson: Okay.

Bobby McGee: And the guy that ran it slowed down considerably. He ran well. I mean, I think he maybe 204, 205 something fast. Yeah. But not right at the top. Not the 201, 202 boys. And all I remembered seeing was. What's so interesting? They had two videos side by side. The one video was at 10k and the other video was at 35k or 40k or something. And I could see he was higher up and he was. His vertical oscillation had got a little higher and so on, but I didn't have any numbers. And then they published the numbers, right? And what was so interesting, he was running slower. But why was he running slower? He hadn't lost his cadence, and great runners don't. His stride length had decreased by almost 10 centimeters. So he was shortening up as he was fatigued. So what was his problem? His problem was a peripheral problem. It wasn't a cardiovascular problem. His legs were failing. You know, and Ross Tucker said a long time ago, the limitation is no longer cardiovascular. It is at the, it's, it's in the legs somewhere. The limitation that stops us from going faster is we are failing on a leg level, whether that's potassium pump or range of motion or muscle shortening or there's some Eastern bloc countries that believe that it's neuromuscular disturbances, that you're no longer able to keep the pattern. And you start going all over the place. And you see this in middle distance running, right? Athletes lose their legs, they become wobbly, they can't control them anymore. That's a neuromuscular challenge. So it's fascinating stuff. We've got a lot to learn. Still loving it.

Carrie Tollefson: Well, and I love that you have it as videos and, you know, on paper as well with a PDF, because that's just. Some people learn differently and I think it's really, it's brilliant that you've been able to, you know, do that both ways. Some of the older runners might like the old school PDF. Some of the young athletes might like it too. Who knows? But it's great.

Bobby McGee: Every, every drill has diagrams as well.

Carrie Tollefson: Nice. We need those.

Bobby McGee: So there's, there's a diagram, there's a video, there's a written aspect, and every video is made from scratch with the coaches there and the athlete teaching them the drill and then moving away and having the athlete do the drill. So it's a complete didactic piece from that perspective. We've, we've never had comebacks where people say, nah, this is not as advertising. So, you know, I'm pretty confident that people will enjoy it from that perspective.

Cool Down Question: Running Shoes and Form

Carrie Tollefson: It's the cool down question. So it kind of relates to you talking about leg fatigue and maybe the new technology that's out there. So John from Seattle, Washington wants to know, as suggested by the podcast, a few weeks ago, we talked about this. He's beginning to wear different run shoes and using that in his weekly routine. So he is wondering how much does a shoe that he's running in affect his run. Run form? How much does it affect his run form?

Bobby McGee: Yep, very much so. So now it's a multifaceted question. It's a great question. All right. And I'll give you a good example of why I think it's a great question. In Boulder, here at Stride, they are now taking elite athletes, elite triathletes and elite runners and they testing their super shoes to find out which super shoe works specifically with their gait. And so it occurred to me, with triathletes that go into a store, even if they have some device measuring which shoe is effective, if they go into the store and they are fresh, what shoe would they choose to race with versus what shoes should they be racing with off the bike? Because those will be different shoes because they fatigued when they're running. Right. And now there's a, there's a physician who's a specialist in feet issues and specifically navicular stress fractures, and he's noticed an increase in navicular stress fractures with super shoes. So now we know a specifically slower runners should definitely not train in super shoes, but probably not racing them as well. And you should just go measure are they making you faster? Because they don't make everybody faster. That's the first thing to look at. Right. Wearing your shoes falls into a very old PT saw, right? Which is fantastically important. You've got to vary your shoes because the major cause of running injuries is overuse. So if you wear the same shoe every day, whether that's a super shoe or not, right. It's much, much better to vary your shoes so that you have slightly less stack height, slightly more stack height, slightly more, you know, support, slightly less support so that your feet are always dealing with slightly differing challenges so that they can condition in a broader bandwidth. But as a general rule of thumb, do your fast stuff and your race based stuff with your super shoes. If you're going to wear super shoes, but don't do your zone one and zone two or even zone three stuff, don't do that with super shoes, do that with regular trainers.

And one of the things that we don't consider is very light runners, school kids and so on, especially the girls, they can't load the super shoe effectively. And if they did a test, they'd find out that a lower profile, simpler shoe, especially in cross country, is a better idea. There's a very good reason why IAAF only allows a 20 millimeter stack height on the track because if you let Those runners use 40 millimeter stack height they will tear the shoe off the sole around the corners, you know, so they just not practical for everything. That's why some shoes are good for marathons and straight lines and other shoes are better for cross country or track and so on because they're more nimble. So those are the things that he needs to consider. But variety is always a good idea in all of your run training, but with your shoes, particularly because you don't overuse.

Closing

Carrie Tollefson: I love it. I can't wait to have more podcasts with you Coach. This is just the we're just scratching the surface here, but everybody needs to go out and check out the RunForm program. It sounds really, really cool and I'm going to definitely get my kiddos going on it too.

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