What is the Difference Between Pose Running and Chi Running?

If you struggle with correcting your heel strike running form to a forefoot strike running form, Pose Running and Chi Running are two excellent sources that’ll teach you to ditch your heel strike running form for good.

How are Pose Running and Chi Running different?

The major differences between Pose Running and Chi Running is Pose Running emphasizes leaning forward with your torso, while getting you to focus on pulling your foot up quickly underneath your hips to initiate the next (shown below).

The Pose Running Method instructs runners to think of pulling the foot up directly underneath their hips, focusing specifically on lifting the back of the heel off the ground using the hamstring muscle groups. In this way, the feet should pop up and down like pistons. At the same time, Pose Running emphasizes leaning forward from the ankles. The net effect is reduced time spent braking, a shorter stride and a higher cadence, and also helps you move away from heel striking. In the research, Pose Running has been confirmed repeatedly to reduce the impacts linked to most injury!

The beneficial outcomes of the running form modifications by Pose Running is a shorter, compact stride where the feet spend less time on the ground and a bigger boost in forward momentum that is easer to sustain via leaning forward. The sum of this is significantly narrower margins of impact intensity and duration as compared with heel strike running.

As for Chi Running, it emphasizes to get your stride to open up more behind you rather than in front, which also reduces stride length and increases cadence.

Chi Running Benefits — To reduce brake time and ensure sustained forward momentum with greater ease, Chi Running recommends letting the foot float up posterior (behind) to the center of mass (your hips), making circular motions with your feet.

The core differences between Pose Running and Chi Running is the perception of removing the foot from the ground. You can either perceive your foot being pulled up directly under your hips (Pose Running), or let your foot float up from the ground behind your torso (Chi Running).

The biggest similarities between Pose Running and Chi Running is for one, they strongly discourage heel striking and provides evidence-backed details on why heel striking when running is most injurious. For another, Chi Running and Pose Running results in the biggest improvements in performance and preventing injury as compared with heel strike running, which is verifiably a major source of injury, and its more inefficient.

The Take Home Message

Both Chi Running and Pose Running methods are enormously effective at correcting your heel strike running style and are overall very helpful in improving your running form in ways that sustains best for performance and injury prevention. Better yet, these immediate improvements get better with time because the more you practice either of these running methods, the more you train your brain to permanently uphold these low-impact, high-efficiency mechanics.

If you’re interested, here’s more on Pose Running, and here’s more on Chi Running.

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