Imagine getting a stride and movement evaluation by one of the world’s leading physical therapists, for free, without having to travel to Bend, Oregon, to get looked at. “A lab in a phone,” is what Jay Dicharry Other Hearst Subscriptions Is On Sale from Nike and Hoka London Marathon Results Dicharry, a physical therapist, expert on running mechanics, and author of Other Hearst Subscriptions A Tester’s Take on the Norda 001.
Get Ready for the Boston Marathon With Race Merch Running Anatomy, spent more than 18 months working with Spencer White, vice president of the Human Performance and Innovation Lab at Saucony, to create the app. The interactive program takes runners through a step-by-step assessment that pinpoints areas where they could improve and provides targeted exercises, stretches, and drills to work on these areas.
The assessment, which takes about 30 minutes to complete, prompts you to take photos and videos of yourself performing maneuvers like squats and hip rotations, then helps you assess yourself against range lines you drag to locations over your images. It also uses your phone’s built-in movement detectors to measure you doing other exercises like a single-leg bridge. Finally, you record video of yourself on a treadmill and observe landing angles and side-to-side hip drop.
Trying out the app, I found the directions easy to follow, although I felt a nagging worry that I might not be doing each step properly. In the end, however, it provided a specific and personal assessment, which was congruent with what I know about myself from professional evaluations in the past, with a few new twists.
The app told me I should work on hip and lower back flexibility and that I have some asymmetries in my hip strength. It also recommended plantar fascia mobility work because I reported that I have had some foot pain. Conveniently, it provides instruction on how to improve in these areas: Today I did hip flexor stretches, single-leg deadlifts, and a lunge move they call the “Twisted Warrior,” following clear, professionally produced videos. For my efforts, I garnered a few hundred “body work points.”
These points are the app’s way to motivate you to do the work necessary to see an improvement in your stride. “It takes a while to change your body,” White says. “It’s not like you do it once and things are better; it takes months, weeks at least.”
When you re-evaluate yourself every few weeks, you can also see progress displayed in bars on a pentagon that shows the five areas of assessment—stance, mobility, stability, stride, and power (a measure of explosive ability the details of which are still to come).
The app doesn’t make shoe recommendations or try to sell you anything, so why did Saucony make the investment? “It came from the Saucony philosophy that we want to help runners,” White says, while acknowledging that this feeds their bottom line interest as well. “We want to grow our potential market. Every time a runner quits running, we’ve lost a customer for life. We need to figure out how to make running an activity that more people engage in, more people are happy engaging in—and get their friends to engage in.”
You can find numerous articles and several books on the subject of the overall body work necessary to run better, including the forthcoming Runner’s World: How Can Pronation Affect Your Shoe Choice and Dicharry’s own work. While these books provide the larger “why” for these assessments and exercises, the app complements them, helping you personalize the information and actually do the work. “You read this stuff in the book and you didn’t do it either,” Dicharry told me. “Because you didn’t have the tool to make it interactive and keep you accountable.”
Dicharry says he’s never met a runner who couldn’t improve in some aspect, but the app is primarily aimed at less experienced runners to help them find more joy in the sport.
“For some runners, it is about race times,” White says. “The bigger opportunity is getting more people to enjoy running. The good news is the exact same program that allows somebody to increase miles to get faster also can get somebody off the couch and enjoy getting out into the world.”
Dicharry and White realize the half-hour assessment can seem like a lot to a new runner—or an old one who would rather be out on the road, for that matter—but felt it was necessary without sacrificing the accuracy of the analysis. Even more difficult is getting runners to do the daily work, which is where the app’s education and motivation will hopefully make a difference.
“We know we can help runners better than we are at the moment, as a running industry,” White says. “We have the knowledge, but we need to package this information in a way that it is easy and accessible, and maybe even fun.”
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