Do Better Fitness

Two paces. Same cadence.

→ 10:00/mile at 175 spm
→ 7:30/mile at 175 spm

How?

Your optimal cadence doesn’t change when you speed up. What changes is everything around it.

As you go faster:
→ Your stride length opens up
→ Your arm swing extends
→ Your back heel lifts higher
→ Your hips extend further behind you

Cadence stays. The system around it gets bigger.
Most runners get this backwards. They try to “increase cadence” to run faster. The work isn’t there. The work is in finding YOUR cadence — the rhythm where your body moves most efficiently — and then letting everything else open up as you push the pace.
It takes practice to find. But when you land on it, you’ll feel it:
→ You feel light
→ You feel strong
→ You stop overstriding
→ Knee pain backs off
→ You’re working less and moving faster

That’s the breakthrough.

If you want help finding your cadence — and the rest of the mechanics that lock in efficiency…

Comment DO BETTER to apply and work together 🫡

Part 1 was the diagnosis… — Part 2 is the fix.

Bouncing comes from two limits: your ankle can’t bend forward, and your hip can’t open behind you. Here’s how to actually change that.

Mobility — open the range:
→ Calf stretches → ankle dorsiflexion through the gastroc
→ Knee-bent dorsiflexion → opens the soleus, the engine for distance running
→ Couch stretch → unlocks hip extension so the chain doesn’t stop short

Strength — own the range:
→ Bridges
→ Hip thrusts
→ Single-leg hip thrusts
→ RDLs
→ Single-leg RDLs

This is your posterior chain. Build it, and your calf stops doing the whole job.

The biggest thing → run hills.

Hills are the cheat code. They force your ankle to dorsiflex, force your hip to extend, and force you to push horizontally — because if you push vertically up a hill, you go nowhere. Your body learns the pattern on its own.

Then carry that feeling to your flat runs. Same push direction. Same posterior chain engagement. Same efficiency.

Patterns, not positions. You’re not thinking about it mid-run — you’re training your body to default to it.

Comment “PRERUN” and I’ll send you 2 weeks free access to the Pre-Run app.

That’s where the full 12-week program lives — built to rewire this exact pattern, plus everything else that turns hard miles into efficient ones.

If you’ve been running for years and still feel like something’s off… this might be why.

Proprioception is your body’s ability to sense how it’s moving through space. And for runners, it’s everything.

When your proprioception is weak, your body doesn’t have a strong awareness of how it’s actually moving forward.

You might think you’re running efficiently… but your mechanics are telling a different story.

I see this show up in 5 common running styles:
→ The Overstrider — foot landing too far out in front, braking with every step
→ The Weaver — body drifting side to side instead of moving in a straight line
→ The Collapser — hip dropping on each stride, throwing off your entire chain
→ The Bouncer — too much energy going vertical instead of forward
→ The Glute Amnesiac — posterior chain barely firing, quads doing all the work

None of these make you a bad runner. But all of them are costing you energy, efficiency, and speed.

The good news? When you train your proprioception — through strength work, single-leg stability, and movement pattern practice — your body starts to self-correct.

Your mechanics improve. Your running economy improves. And your runs start to feel more effortless without having to think through every step.
That’s the goal.

Comment FIX to find out what running style you fall into and what to do about it.

Comment DO BETTER to work together 1-on-1. 💪

Cadence might be the one thing that changes everything about how your run feels.

And I don’t mean chasing 180 steps per minute. I mean finding your cadence — the one where your legs feel the lightest.

Because if your legs are feeling heavy by mile 1, 2, or 3 — that’s not just fatigue. That might be your form working against you.

The goal is simple:
→ Feel light
→ Feel relaxed
→ Feel like you’re not forcing every step

Here’s how to start finding it:
Get a playlist that matches the beat you’re looking for. Let the music pace you naturally — you’d be surprised how much easier it is to sync your stride to a song than to think about it consciously.

Or use a metronome for the first few minutes of your run. Match your steps to it, feel what that cadence is like in your body — then turn it off and try to hold that feeling without the sound.

That’s the key. Not the metronome. The feeling.
The more you practice it, the less you have to think about it. And that’s the whole point — running should eventually feel effortless. Automatic. Like your body just knows.

It won’t happen overnight. Some runs you’ll find it, some you won’t. But the more you chase the feeling instead of the number, the closer you get.

Hope this helps. 🙏

Comment DO BETTER to learn more about my Do Better Run Program. 💪

If you notice your hip collapsing… this post is for you.

This is the collapser.

And it might be behind everything you’ve been dealing with as a runner.

Here’s what’s happening:
→ Every time your foot hits the ground, your hip drops on the opposite side
→ That drop changes the path your leg drives forward
→ Your body can’t stay in a straight line — so it compensates
→ And that compensation is usually where the pain lives

Your knee. Your IT band. Your lower back. They’re not the problem. They’re the result.

Here’s where to start:
Plank crossovers — trains the hip abductors to keep you level on each stride
Single Leg toe touches — builds posterior chain stability for single-leg loading + proprioception
Side planks — activates the glute med, the main muscle failing in this pattern + core stability

These are a starting point. But if you want a structured 12-week program built specifically around your running mechanics — comment “PRERUN” and I’ll send you details on getting into the app.

You cannot sleep off a running injury.

I keep having this conversation with runners who’ve been “waiting it out” for weeks, sometimes months. The pain hasn’t gone anywhere… it’s just moved. Left knee, then right hip. Right ankle, then left calf. And every time, they’re surprised.

Here’s what’s actually happening:
When something hurts, your brain doesn’t stop the movement. It reroutes it. Your body finds a new way to do what you’re asking, even if that new way is mechanically worse. The “good” side starts compensating, working in patterns it wasn’t built for and eventually, that side breaks too.

That thing you’ve noticed where one injury shows up, and a few months later the opposite side goes? That’s not bad luck. That’s biomechanics doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

So go see someone. PT, sports doc, hybrid coach, online coach, in-person coach — whoever you’ve been thinking about reaching out to for the last three months. I genuinely don’t care if it’s me. I’m a gait mechanics guy — if it’s pain while running, I can help. If it’s not, go to the right person for the job.

But stop researching. Stop scrolling. Stop hoping it goes away.

Take the action!

—

First rant on here. Let me know if you want more of these. Slow posting week, but more mechanics content dropping soon. 🤝

Comment “DO BETTER” to learn about the DO BETTER run program, or comment “RUN” and I’ll send you my running fix PDF

Your ankles might be the reason your PR isn’t moving.

Most runners chase PRs through cadence, hip strength, mileage. But every stride starts and ends at the ankle — and a stiff ankle can quietly cap your output no matter how hard the rest of your body is working.

Here’s what’s happening in the frontal plane:
Each step, your foot cycles through pronation (absorbing force on contact) and supination (creating a rigid lever for push-off). That cycle is what turns vertical force into forward propulsion.

When your ankle is stiff, you can’t load fully into pronation. Without that load, you can’t supinate to push off. Energy leaks. Your stride loses the snap that makes speed.

You don’t need to think about this mid-run. You need to train it so it happens automatically.

Three to start with:
→ Heel-elevated squats, unsupported. Loads the ankle through full dorsiflexion under tension. The elevation isn’t to make the squat easier — it’s to find your actual ankle range and build strength inside it.
→ Single-leg isometric balance, forefoot loaded, heel unsupported. The foot-strength piece most runners skip. Trains the foot to organize itself under load.
→ Bulgarian heel raises. Single-leg loading through end-range plantarflexion. Where your push-off is actually built.

Train the joints doing the work.