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You establish posture (pose) to receive the force of gravity into the frame of the body.
You lean (fall) forward to channel that force from vertical to horizontal, pulling the body forward. To create that lean, you hold posture and slide the center of mass (COM) forward, in front of our support point.
Rather than push off with the supporting foot, you simply pull that heel straight toward your hip – or more accurately, right where your hip will be a fraction of a second later as it travels forward. The action of pulling your heel pulls your leg’s COM toward the torso’s COM, which blends into the rotation of the torso, which activates the ‘Coriolis Effect’ increasing the rate of rotation. This turns into free acceleration, flinging that side of the body forward with minimal muscle activation!
The amount of lean affects your speed. It is the ‘gas pedal’ so to speak, the accelerator. The amount of lean-with-posture you can handle depends on your comfort with how far you can lean while maintaining a controlled fall forward, and how flexible your hips and ankles are. As speed increases, the stride spreads out behind you, not in front.
The greater degree of lean will require more rearward extension of your leg and more dorsal flexion of the ankle, more release in the Achilles tendon. Your speed is dependent on the angle of lean, and your angle of lean is dependent on the flexibility of these two sections of the leg: the hip flexor and the ankle. Those may need to be improved, and will require a consistently applied, process of stretching over weeks and months.
Without these, if you try to run faster than your joints and skill are currently capable of, you either increase the risk of strain on the joints or your form shifts away from the ideal to accommodate. Hopefully, you can appreciate the need to not only work on improved technique, but also to gradually increase the running-specific flexibility of your joints through careful, persistent conditioning outside of running time.
Once you set your posture, and affect the fall, your only action is to pull the heel. You don’t need to focus on pushing off the ground.
But you will soon discover that these three actions are not easy to maintain for very long, or to hold consistently. This is what your training is for – not to become stronger at pushing your body forward, but to become stronger at holding posture, staying on the edge of falling, and pulling each heel toward the hip, over and over again, mile after mile, uphill, downhill and flat.
You train to hold these features when energy is abundant in order to delay fatigue. Then, when energy is scarce, when you feel fatigue, you double your attention and train to hold these features in order to maintain your pace longer.
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