John Kiely on Robust Running

My guest on the podcast today is John Kiely. John is a senior lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, Institute for Coaching and Performance.

I've been reading John’s research for several years now and his papers are always very interesting and fun. He's written on a wide variety of subjects like running, coordination, periodization and the science of smooth movement. You can find links to some of my favorite papers below.

What I really like about John’s writing is that he relates specific data points to big ideas, like complex systems, evolution, or stress/adaptation. And the perspective is very broad, so he makes interesting connections between seemingly unrelated topics. In his paper on smoothness, he refers to the Supreme Court free-speech debates about pornography. In his article about periodization, he writes about Henry Ford's theories of efficient car production in factories.

When John agreed to do this podcast, I was excited to talk about a whole bunch of topics, but we focused on one: how to be a coordinated and robust runner. In John's view, running performance and injury is far more about coordination then we might imagine. We talked about:

* the neural hierarchies governing coordination, ranging from the “smart” motor cortex to the “dumb” reflexes

* what neural “degeneracy” means and how it’s different from redundancy.

* the role of variability in performance and injury prevention

* how fatigue and aging affect variability and coordination

* why I strained my hamstring in my soccer game last week and what that has to do with coordination

* how to train fast versus slow reflexes

* the role of perturbation in training coordination

* John’s opinions on the work of Frans Bosch

We could have gone on for much longer, and I have many more questions, so I plan to ask John for more time in the near future.

Links

John’s research

John on Twitter

Some great papers by John that I recommend:

* Smoothness: an Unexplored Window into Coordinated Running Proficiency

* My post about the smoothness paper

* Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth

* The Robust Running Ape: Unraveling the Deep Underpinnings of Coordinated Human Running Proficiency

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