Case Study: Running
The pictures below are the workout details of an 18-year-old cross country runner’s tempo runs before and after going through Muscle Activation. The second run occurred after 2 treatments of 30 minutes each where he learned that his foot muscles and gluteus maximus had been turned off. The gluteus maximus is the key to achieving faster speeds and better performance with researchers finding that elite sprinters had gluteus maximuses that were 45% larger than the gluteus maximuses of sub-elite sprinters. In fact, the gluteus maximus is the only muscles that differentiates elite and sub-elite runners as researchers also found NO differences size of other leg muscles of elite runners and sub-elite runners. Weak glutes cause the pelvis to be rotated excessively forward during running which can causes quadricep dominance which is when the quadricep muscles to work much harder than posterior muscles such as hamstrings and glute muscles. Quadricep dominance can lead to problems such as knee pain, hip pain, and foot issues.
Thus, on top of muscle activation, the runner incorporated exercise targeted at the strengthening the gluteus maximus and gluteus Medius such as neutral grip deadlift, split squats, and single-leg deadlifts. In the second tempo run, we see and 11 second drop in pace along with a steep increase in endurance as the runner held the faster pace for 10 minutes long than the previous run. The runner also reported that he has experienced significantly less knee pain than he did during summer training and has spent fewer days on the bike recovering from fried calf muscles than he did during both his junior and senior year cross country seasons. We estimate this change occurred due to a significant decrease in dependence on quadricep dominance and a significant increase in the engagement of the gluteus maximus and gluteus Medius muscles in his running form due to activation and strengthening of the muscles.
The first run was from the runner’s junior year cross country season and occurred on September 18th, 2020. The second run occurred during the runner’s offseason training for his senior year track season on January 4th, 2022.