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David Weck here. In this video, I'm going to teach you an exercise to help you run with the WeckMethod Wing Pulse. Now, if you're not familiar with the Wing Pulse, it's a new strategy for running [Proper Running Techniques] that involves pulsing the arms, not swinging them.
Here's a brief demonstration: Conventional running, I will swing and counter-balance the action of my body, my legs with my arms. With WeckMethod, and this pulsing para-dime, what we want to do is we want to create this pulsing force, arms around the front side so we're not swinging them per-say, but what we're doing is creating a pulsing force for propulsion. Run faster. It's more efficient. It's less wear and tear on your body. You're on the ground less time. You're faster to the finish, and it's a lot more joy to run with the Wing Pulse. Wing Pulse is for anything faster than walking, anything slower than sprinting. For sprinting, we have the Double Down Pulse.
Now, the hard part is learning how to run with it. Once you learn it, the easy part is running with it. This exercise is a fantastic way to start building your skill and your bodies strength of connective tissue that will get you running faster, more efficiently than ever before.
So, here's what you do: Tie in an elastic band and use a very light elastic band. You're going to tie it in elbow height. So, tie it in elbow height. This is important to setup. Grab from underhand and you're going to figure out what distance makes most sense to you. You're going to wrap the band under the forearm and around the elbow so it would look like this. That's the position. So, I'm here. I wrap it under, and I'm here. So I'm going to be putting tension here, and tension here. I want to line up my wrist just like this, hence that elastic resistance, and now what I'm going to do is step out and lunge with that tension in that arm as it's drawn to this position. I don't want to bring this, it's not a muscle force thing, it's connective tissue. You want to think in terms of a really good arm wrestle. It's how they wedge their body, and it's the whole body. So if I go any further down, I'm going to have to use my whole body. It's integrated throughout. You don't want to hurt yourself so you go very slow. So it's here. Wrap it around. Now, I'm going to keep the line of force on the band like this, and I'm going to step over 3-4 inches, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to lunge out, and I'm going to pull with this hand, and let the resistance happen here. Ideally, I want to match the angle of my spine and my shins and just come out to lunge. Feel that stretch of resistance and feel that stretch of resistance.
If I do it right towards you, what you'll see is that I'm employing our WeckMethod Head Over Foot strategy which involves a side bending action. So, when I do that lunge, I will keep the head in line with the foot and I'm pulling that here. My strategy is I want to keep this spot (10th and 11th rib) the same. So I don't want that to be rotating. What I want is I want my shoulder to come down and back, with that staying the same, and then my hip and that lunge coming up and forward and I'm in this position.
So what does this do for us: What this does is it integrates the connective tissue so that when I step and land on this Head Over Foot, I now know how to pulse. So the return action is not muscular. The return action is just this pulsing force that doesn't cost me any energy. I'm using gravity, the alignment of Head Over Foot, the spiraling action of the arm, the way that it's built, and the lats and the pecs, all that coming together to send me into a pulse. All my intention is this down with the elbow, back with the wrist, creates a little pulse. The problem is most people have this sort of muscle bound carryover from all the lifting that they've done, that you can't release the muscles so you don't get the return. What we want is we want that effect, the whipping action. The advantage of the elastics is that it's going to take you to that limit range of motion and it's going to start putting that tension into the limit range of motion so it's essentially it's springing resistance that if we were to let go of that resistance, it's going to pop forward. So it's really good for the nervous system, and it's really good for the angle of the technique, and it's a fast accelerate for learning how to do this.
Let's do the other side [Non-Dominant Side Training]. So it's here. Palm on the elastic. I wrap the elastic behind here. So I'm pulling with this opposite hand and I'm getting out all of the slack. Now, I lunge out, I put my head over my foot, and I want to drop my elbow low. I want to drop my shoulder down and back, raise my hip up and forward, and I just take that slack out, and then easy relax. Do not work this exercise to extreme levels, especially at first. So it's here. And if you're doing it correctly, you'll feel the lats, the lat on that side. Now my body is primed to put that pulsing action in. What I'm doing is I want to feel that lat coming down and back, hip coming up and forward, and then I'm putting that stretch, dropping the elbow, and that stretch takes me to that limited range of motion where there's no slack, and then, you do it, once you find it, you'll never run the same. The Wing Pulse will give you that little pop in your step. It'll feel much less effort, and like I said, you'll feel faster, and it's much less wear and tear on your body.
What I'd recommend is that this is a daily exercise and you just never go to soreness. Think of it as a stretch, and just do it, and then we'll practice the other exercise techniques ultimately to put it together for the Wing Pulse.
