Your Guide to Run Categories
RunDNA groups common running-form patterns into categories. Each one comes with a specific cue designed to help you move more efficiently and lower your injury risk.
Your Formula surfaces one category at a time, the single pattern that matters most for your body right now. That category can change once you've worked on your form. A reassessment is how you'll know if it's time to move on to a new focus.
Overstrider: Knee Drive
Overstriding means your foot lands far in front of your body, which increases stress on your joints and tissues. One cause is low knee height during the swing phase. The cue: drive your knee forward, like you're kneeing a soccer ball away from you. This shortens your step length and reduces the stress of a far-forward landing.
Overstrider: Metronome
Overstriding can also come from a slow cadence, which forces a longer stride to cover the same ground. The cue: match your foot strikes to a metronome beat, running at 5–10% faster cadence than normal. Shortening your step length this way brings your foot landing closer to your body.
Overstrider: Foot Off Ground
A third path to overstriding is spending too much time on the ground with each step. The cue here: get your foot off the ground as quickly as possible after it lands, which keeps you landing closer to your center of mass.
Cadence: Metronome
A low cadence (steps per minute) is linked to longer strides, more bounce, and increased stress on the body. The cue: match your foot strikes to a metronome beat, running at 5–10% faster cadence than normal.
Cadence: Foot Off Ground
Also targets low cadence, but through a different cue: get your foot off the ground as quickly as possible after it lands. Spending less time on the ground naturally raises your step rate.
Be mindful not to speed up while working on this cue. It's easy to raise your cadence by simply running faster, but that masks the actual change. These adjustments should happen at an easy, constant pace.
Bouncer
Excessive vertical oscillation, or bouncing too much with each step, wastes energy and increases landing stress. The cue: pick a spot on the horizon and limit how much it moves up and down as you run.
Collapser: Run Long
If your knees cave in or your hip drops with each stride, that's collapsing, which leaks energy and adds stress. The cue: run "long," like a ski jumper, which engages your core to keep your leg more stable and stacked.
Collapser: Foot Off Ground
Also addresses collapsing, through a shorter stance phase. The cue: pull your foot off the ground as quickly as possible after it lands, reducing the time gravity has to pull you into a collapsed position.
Glute Amnesiac: Run Uphill
Running is a series of controlled falls. Without enough forward lean, those falls become inefficient and put excess stress on the body, often because a runner is unconsciously reducing the work done by their glutes. The cue: lean forward like you're running up a hill. The lean comes from the ankles, not the waist.
Performance Optimization
This is the catch-all category for runners who don't clearly fit one of the specific patterns above. There's always room for improvement, and this category focuses on general efficiency and continued refinement rather than correcting one dominant limiter.