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Comment by VeejayRampay | Hacker News Reader

Every sport in the world is a direct source of injuries if you combine too important a workload and bad form. Your injuries have nothing to do with running itself, an activity that has been central to the human species' way of life for millions of years and that the human body is naturally designed for.

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>way of life for millions of years and that the human body is naturally designed for.

yea we don't live that way of life anymore. We are talking about running for fitness after sitting in front of a computer for the rest of the day.

If it is so natural why do we need to read books and blogs about form? Are you suggesting that prehistoric people went through "running form bootcamps" before making it their "way of life" ?

What I meant is that the human species is naturally gifted for endurance running. We're not naturally gifted for underwater activities, we're not really designed for flying, but running at a moderate speed for long periods of time is something that we're naturally good at (and specific parts of our bodies are specifically designed in a way that helps with that activity).

The reason why we need to read books and get interested in the theory is especially because we're culturally evolved in a way that doesn't require for us to run around all day long. The skills associated with running are now almost obsolete when they were absolutely crucial back in the days of hunting and foraging for food. As a result, we've kind of lost touch with the minute details of what makes for efficient running, just like I'm not sure a lot of people would know how to make a fire in the wild anymore, those activities are a bonus now, not a necessity.

You don't really see animals running for hours in the wild. They sprint to hunt or survive, then they walk.

Humans tended to hunt animals to exhaustion. The sprinting predators you're talking about stalk in close then sprint to take down their prey; groups of hunter-gatherer humans have instead tended to chase animals a long distance at moderate speed until the animals drop from exhaustion. It makes it easier to take them down, when you consider that humans are not really going to be jumping on the back of a buffalo and biting its neck to kill it.

So you don't tend to see animals running for hours because that's a human speciality (among predators), and it's part of why we've been so successful as a species, despite our physical weakness compared to other predators.

Those were particular humans and the method worked in hot weather. Wolves hunt the same way, wound the animal then exhaust it. I don't think humans used this approach in Europe.

And the reason people need technique bootcamp is they're not physically active anymore. They have muscular imbalances that need direct attention to correct.

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