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Good Neighbor Podcast North Atlanta
Bringing Together Local Businesses & Neighbors of North Atlanta
Good Neighbor Podcast North Atlanta
EP #112: Functionize Health - Biggest Mistake Runners Make with Lauren Sok
Unlock the secrets to running faster and more efficiently with insights from Lauren Sok, a skilled physical therapist and the visionary behind Functionize Health and Physical Therapy. This episode promises to transform your running game with Lauren's expert advice on adopting a faster cadence through shorter, quicker steps. Delve into the world of biomechanics as Lauren shares how engaging your posterior chain and avoiding overstriding can lead to a more efficient and less impactful run. Whether you're a seasoned marathoner or just lacing up your running shoes, her practical tips are designed to enhance your performance and reduce the risk of injury.
As a key advocate for active living, Lauren also talks about her role in the Active Dunwoody group, which brings the community together through engaging activities like group runs and yoga. This initiative is all about fostering a supportive environment for everyone, from fitness newcomers to seasoned athletes. If retraining your running form feels daunting, fear not—Functionize Health offers personalized running assessments to help you hone your technique and alleviate any discomfort. Tune in to discover how you can join in, meet fellow residents, and embark on a journey toward a healthier lifestyle.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast North Atlanta, where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Stacey Risley.
Speaker 2:Hello friends and neighbors. Welcome to North Atlanta's Good Neighbor Podcast. Today we're here with Lauren Stock. She is a physical therapist and the owner of Functionize Health and Physical Therapy. She has a location here in Dunwoody and also one in Decatur, so welcome back, lauren. How are you?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. Thanks for having me again.
Speaker 2:Well, we are pleased to have you back. Lauren is our expert contributor for her industry for the Dunwoody Neighbors publication and she has recently submitted an article that was just fantastic and really relevant to the Dunwoody community because there are so many runners, so the article was titled the Biggest Mistake Runners Make when Trying to Run Faster. And Lauren's here to share her knowledge with us today and let us in on this little secret for those of you who don't receive the magazine, so we're really glad you're here.
Speaker 1:Well, we're talking about running, which is one of my favorite things to talk about. I am a runner and, as you mentioned, there's so many people in Dunwoody running all over the place, whether it's at Brook Run Park or up and down Chamblee, dunwoody, mount Vernon, just through any trails that we have. So I love to talk about this, and even at my business, my practice, we see so many runners who come in and say you know, I'm training for something, whether it's their first 5k or they're a experienced runner who's doing the 10 miler, which was just recently at Atlantic Station, or a half marathon or full marathon. So everybody's trying to improve their efficiency and their time, and that's what we do. We love helping people become better runners.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you mentioned that there are so many runners here in Dunwoody and that you are an active member of that running community and that just kind of reminded me that you also are. Are you kind of the founder of the group Active Dunwoody? Yeah, that is a running group those of you who are listening that don't know if you are a runner there's a Lauren has a great group here in Dunwoody that's called Active Dunwoody. It's on Facebook. You can find that and they you guys play in all kinds of things. If I was an active runner, I'm a member of that group. I am active in Dunwoody.
Speaker 1:It's all about just keeping people active and healthy in their lifestyle, so it's not even just running. Most of the things that we have on Thursday, the second and fourth Thursday of the month, we do a group run or walk, so we actually have more walkers than we do runners. We meet at one of the businesses in the Dunwoody Village and then walk or run from there and come back. It's usually about a 30 minute run or you know walk. We come back and we eat and we hang out and that's really fun. But we do like really cool things, like last week we did a scavenger hunt. Really cool things Like. Last week we did a scavenger hunt. So the scavenger hunt is at different businesses. The last one was at Velvet Taco and you have an hour to find clues that are all throughout Dunwoody. So you can walk, you can run, you get prizes for finding more clues. We probably have anywhere from 50 to 100 people show up and that is one of the most fun things you can do and done.
Speaker 1:What do you learn about history, about all the cemeteries, businesses, um, so definitely look for that. That's twice a year that we do do that. We have laughter yoga that we've done outside of my office, so that's really cool. Um, we've done yoga in the park. We have a workout at the end of October with Alloy. That's like a pumpkin workout. So we try to make it really fun and it's for anybody of any level, and pets can come to our events, kids can come. So, yeah, you don't have to be a runner. If you want to run, you can run, but you don't have to be.
Speaker 2:Well, I am very glad you cleared that up. I may be more likely to come because I know laughter. You know laughter, yoga and yoga in the park.
Speaker 1:I can do those things and I know, I know exactly Fantastic Low barrier to entry activities that bring people together, because I mean, what you know is you know, as adults, it's really hard to meet people, right, and so if you can come together just because you want to stay active and meet people along the way, then that's really what it's all about.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and I love that you do this. You're really embedded into the Dunwoody community in so many ways you know beyond just through FunctionEyes, you know. So I love it, I love that you do that and you are so plugged in and and you know offering all of this for residents for free. You know to be a part of that. So absolutely so. Okay, we just got way detoured we went down a rabbit hole but it was a very good rabbit hole.
Speaker 1:It was a good rebel, but yes we got to go back to the original question, which is the biggest myth that runners make when trying to run faster. Yeah, so what is the biggest mistake? The biggest myth is that people think that in order to run or even walk faster, that they have to take bigger steps. You'll hear people say, oh you know, my husband's really tall and he takes these really big steps, so I take big steps to keep up with them, when actually the most efficient runners take shorter steps and many more. So we call that cadence. Cadence is the number of steps you take in a minute, and a faster cadence makes you more efficient. And so what we teach people and that's the lowest hanging fruit when you're a runner is teaching people to understand their cadence and how they can impact that through form drills and through different coaching techniques and strength training that we offer to help people get there.
Speaker 2:That it cause that it's a logical assumption you know, or misconception to come to. You know that that longer steps mean you know, you assume that if you're struggling to keep up with someone you can think of. When you're a kid and you're trying to keep up with your mom, you know she's got such long legs. How am I ever going to keep up? How am I going to do it?
Speaker 1:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 2:So, yeah.
Speaker 1:So you know, once you show people that it's really about their steps, then they're like oh my gosh, this is so much easier. Why didn't somebody tell me so? So a lot of times we have people that come in that are they're a runner or a walker, or maybe they haven't exercised in a while, with nagging back pain, knee pain, hip pain, and we and they're walkers and they want to resume walking and we'll put them on the treadmill and film them, and simply getting them to shorten their stride can clear up a lot of problems that they have in their in their body. So it's it's super cool to see people like relearn how to walk or run, because they're like why should I have to relearn this? And we, just by coaching them, they're like holy cow, like I'm doing so much better, I feel better, I'm going faster and getting my heart rate up, which is what we all should be doing for cardiovascular purposes.
Speaker 1:And you know, the interesting thing that happens, especially in women, is this changes when we, after we have kids, because when we're pregnant, we tend to do the side to side waddle and if you think, nine months, you create a habit in nine months that if somebody doesn't teach you how to retrain that. You're still going to waddle side to side and create a lot of problems. So we have to teach you how to roll over your foot and move forward. Walking and running is a forward movement. We have to teach you how to move forward rather than moving side to side. And they laugh. People laugh and they're like oh my gosh, I never thought this was a thing. But like, just like, if you have an injury to your knee and you have to give rehab to learn how to like walk without a stiff leg, why wouldn't you do that after having kids?
Speaker 2:That's yeah, that makes perfect sense. Um, you know, I never would have associated a shorter step with. You know, with a faster pace I mean I just would not have. Um, would never have made come to that conclusion on my own.
Speaker 1:So I'm like, for example, like the novice runner might be running at a cadence of like 150 steps per minute right, which is slow compared to like we tell people they really have to get up to 160 to 180 steps per minute, and elite athletes are well over 200 steps in a minute.
Speaker 1:And the reason that's important is that if you're going really slow and you're you're taking these like big steps and you're the it, what it creates is your foot's in contact with the ground for a longer period of time, and when your foot's in contact with the ground for a long period of time, you there's room for injury, and what we want is to have your contact time on the ground shorter, because there's less time to create an injury. So if you just tap your foot down and pull it back off, there's no time to have an injury because it's just tapping and going. But if you're putting your foot down and keeping it there, then you have all these things. You could waddle side to side, you can have weird arm swing that creates something. Um, it's really about, yeah, like, how quickly do you pull your foot off the ground rather than landing and putting a lot of weight into your leg, which creates the injury?
Speaker 2:Well, I can definitely hear your expertise in the fact that you I know that you don't have the article even in front of you right now You're winging it because you are so good at this. You just hit the second bullet. The first bullet was cadence reduction, so it would kind of hit that. And then now the second one was increased ground contact time. I didn't think about that. You know less opportunity to work for that, you know. If less, less opportunity to work for injury, you know with that, is there anything else about that? Increased, you know, ground contact time that you want to touch on.
Speaker 1:Well, so you know, what can happen is if you're, if if you're taking these big steps, you also tend to do what's called over striding.
Speaker 1:Over striding is means that your foot is reaching far out in front of your body and when we do that we tend to reach with a straight knee. So our knee becomes straight, our heel makes contact in front of us and that actually creates a breaking force. So we're actually creating a break when we hit the ground that we have to roll over. But if we take short steps, we tend to land more on a flat foot rather than a heavy heel strike and we'll tend to land underneath our body, which is kind of then allows us to roll over our foot because our foot's underneath us and we just keep moving our body weight over our foot rather than our foot reaching way out in front of us and us having to overcome the leg being stiff and then rolling over the leg. So it's kind of a weird idea, but you want to land underneath your body and not overstride, and that's what shortening up that the stride, but increasing the cadence will help you do.
Speaker 2:That makes sense and I, you know, I will definitely never call myself a runner, Definitely currently no longer a runner, but you know, I did, you know, run track in high school and even just like back way back in those days, I wish someone had shared this information with me you know cause I was, I was fast, but that's uh and and, but I really did always associate speed with, you know, height and you know having the long legs and being able to make those long strides, and so I would have to.
Speaker 2:if I was still running, I would really be having to relearn some things in order to be effective. Well, the next thing, lauren, that you said in your article. You talked about high, higher impact forces.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I mean it's. It's kind of the same as this overstriding. So if you overstride and you take this big step out in front of you, you're landing with a much higher like impact or into the ground. And if we take shorter strides, we tend to be more on the front of our foot, on our forefoot, and so we're creating more springiness to then come off of that. Instead of trying to reach again and kind of slam our heel into the ground. What we want is to land a little bit more on our midfoot or forefoot. So we're landing and then pulling our foot off and it's just this very quick springiness that happens, and so there's less impact in the ground and less stress on our bodies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you really think about it, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you are like you know, when you're talking about reaching way out in front of you and you're having, you know, your heel first and then you're kind of pulling your body forward then with your, your leg and your foot and your knee and your everything else, so it really does make a whole lot of sense. I just wish someone had explained it to me sooner. The next, the next thing you talked about was inefficient energy use, you know, with the longer strides. So do you want to touch on that now?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the comparison I like to make is, if we take these big strides and we reach way out in front of us with a straight knee, you compare it to like a grandfather clock and think of that big arm of grandfather clock. It's very slow and laborious, right, it's trying to go side to side, but if you take these short steps it becomes a cuckoo clock. That's very quick. You're going very, very fast. No-transcript. Like you hit the ground with your forefoot, you pull your heel off, bend your knee and then come back around, bend your knee and then come back around. It creates this like wheel that's going very fast, like this cuckoo clock of like fast pulling versus this very long moment arm or um or lever arm to get your foot off the ground.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I love that analogy. That's very, yeah, easy to understand. I mean, the plots are keeping the same speed and whether that you're doing all the hard work or not, I mean I know running is still hard work, but well, the last thing was talking about muscle engagement and that was the last major point of your, your article. Do you want to talk about that one?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So you know when we're. When we're taking these you know big strides, or our cadence is low our muscles, like we talked about, are on your foot's, in contact with the ground for a longer time, so the muscles are working really, really hard because they're keeping you upright, and so if we take shorter steps and our foot striking the ground very quickly and pulling off, then we're more efficient in using our muscles, and it actually requires us to use more of our bigger muscles, like our glutes and our hamstrings. If we take these big steps and overstride, we tend to use our quads more and a lot of muscles that aren't necessarily as important for running. I mean they are, but like to be quick with running.
Speaker 1:You really want your glutes and your hamstrings to work. So that's what we're talking about is like let's work all the muscles on what we call our posterior chain. So all the muscles on the backside of our body, from the crown of our head all the way down to the bottom of our feet, is our posterior chain. We want all of that to turn on, because that's what's going to propel us forward. If we're taking these, you know these, these steps that are very big and our cadence is very low, then we're just using our muscles so inefficiently and they are going to get fatigued more quickly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense too, and this is just really an eye opening episode for me and your article is eye opening. It really is a simple concept overall you know, there's a lot to it, but it's really once.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that the biggest challenge would be, like you mentioned earlier in the episode, just retraining. You know how to, to relearn some of this, this stuff, if you've been doing it incorrectly or with with, you know, bad form all these years and and you're now wanting to set it because a lot of times people become runners later in life you know that they didn't, they were never properly trained, and then they, you know, want to start being able to be a part of active Dunwoody and do these different things, and to start off doing it correctly would be, you know, equally as important as relearning. I really have been blown away by the biking and running community of Dunwoody.
Speaker 2:I mean if you live in Dunwoody and you don't run or bike, you might need to start.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, you know, if somebody comes into our office to improve this, we do like a running analysis and we are offering a discount in that. If you mentioned that, you came from Dunwoody Neighbors Magazine and so you know I forget what I put in there. Was it $99 for running assessment?
Speaker 2:$99 running assessments with our physical therapist?
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, so if you mentioned this, you can come in and get a running assessment. So what that is is a full hour assessment where we film you on our treadmill, we use the iPad and we film you from behind and we film you from the side and then we kind of analyze that with you and then we give you tips that you can use to improve that and we refilm you and you would be amazed at how much better in one hour we can make somebody run more efficiently, you know, with less pain and they're, and it's we put them side by side and they're like I can't even believe that I thought I was a runner in that first video because I they look like, they're like, you know, shuffling their feet or like bouncing up and down or something. And then you, they see the second one. They're like oh my gosh, I'm pumping my arms, I'm pulling my feet off the ground, I look like I'm actually moving forward in space and it's.
Speaker 2:It's phenomenal that one hour can make really change your life, and so you're getting the before and the after in within that hour. Yeah, it doesn't take very much to, just to change that.
Speaker 1:So I would highly encourage people and we do this for walkers too Like, if you're a walker and you're like I have, you know, some sort of nagging problem when I walk like we film them. And they're like, oh my goodness, this, I didn't even know that I could change it. So, um, and you know, like people, people hear really interesting things when they, like providers will tell them like, oh, you know, you shouldn't walk faster than 3.5 on a treadmill, and I'll say why. And they're like, well, some you know doctor told me that was bad on my back. I'm like but like you're so tall and like you, you can, like you're, you know, healthy and fit, why wouldn't you try to walk faster than three? And they, somebody tells them and they think that that's like the rule for the rest of their life.
Speaker 1:And then I get them, you know walking or running faster and like, oh my gosh, it feels better to actually go faster. So you know, some of these things are eyeopening to people, that they were told and they've just used it as like their Bible for health and fitness. So you find it really interesting things.
Speaker 2:So that this 99, I'm back to the $99 assessment. Is this really amazing? So, whether you're a walker or runner, you know, whether you're an athlete or not. You know, if you come into Functional Eyes Health and you mentioned Dunwoody Neighbors or the, I would imagine, the Good Neighbor podcast, either way that you can get a $99 assessment that you're going to film beforehand, you're going to coach on the proper way to do, you know things that they need to improve on and then you're going to have them implement those things that you taught them. You're going to film them and then in an hour, they are going to at least know what to work on and, if there's, if they never come back to functionize, that's okay. That doesn't exclude them, or no? I mean no, this is just a way to help.
Speaker 2:Hopefully they will come back to functionize.
Speaker 1:Right, do what they love, and it's, you know, all ages, like I had one. You know we've had kids as young as eight come who love to run High school and middle school athletes, and it does even if you're not a runner.
Speaker 1:sometimes your sport requires you to run and you've had some issues. So people bring their kids in just to improve their, their running, for, you know, just conditioning purposes. But then I have, you know, people all the way up to master's level runners that are in their seventies that come in for these assessments. So it's really all ages.
Speaker 2:Well, and that brings home a point. You know you said you've had people as young as eight. If you have, if you're a parent and you have a child who you know is moving into sports, you know whether you see that this is going to be something that they whether it's baseball, it doesn't. You know they need to run the bases. I mean, all sports pretty much involve include running. That would be such a great way for them to start their athletic career rather than later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, have injuries With injuries, right.
Speaker 2:So, like I mean, that's a, if you've got kids that are approaching those ages of figuring out what sports are going to be for them, you know, because we definitely want all of our kids to be as active as possible and that's a fantastic thing you can do for your, your child, yeah.
Speaker 1:You know Holidays, right, you could get it as a gift, right, that's a perfect gift to give your. Give a family member too, so.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And grand grandparents to grandkids. I'm like All the ideas, family member too.
Speaker 2:So, absolutely, and grand grandparents to grandkids I'm like that is fantastic and I appreciate you offering that special for our readers and listeners. And I might have to come in and get a running assessment because I know I'm doing some stuff wrong. Come on, Come on in. Well, thank you so much again for that. Well, thank you so much, Lauren again for being here. It has been a pleasure and I look forward to your next article to see what I'm going to get to learn next time.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me, guys.
Speaker 2:Well, that's all for today's episode, Atlanta. I'm Stacey Risley with the Good Neighbor podcast. Thanks for listening and for supporting the local businesses and nonprofits of our great community.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to the Good Neighbor podcast North Atlanta. To nominate your favorite local businesses, visit GNPNorthAtlantacom. That's GNPNorthorthatlantacom.
