Stepping Up Your Game

Running comes naturally to us—from kids running amok with their mates with glee, to adults working out to stay fit or joining marathons, working the body, breathing in and out make us feel free and afford clarity. The instinctual activity, though, comes through only with complex neural and biomechanical orchestrations by the brain and spinal cord neuronal network. A joint study by the School of Biomedical Sciences and the Gerald Choa Neuroscience Centre of CUHK, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Western Sydney University in Australia revealed that our nervous system is able to adjust ways of running according to our age, health conditions and prior workouts. Runners would be able to step up their game and devise training that has our muscles give their best.

To see how the nervous system works in different folks, the team recruited pre-schoolers, unsporty adults, adult runners in training and elite marathoners to run over-ground or on a treadmill, recording their muscles’ electrical activities and the force the body exerted onto the ground as they ran. A sophisticated machine learning algorithm was deployed to analyse the data and identify muscles that move synergistically in the act, which should enlighten us on how muscle coordination changes across age and athletic capacity.

For pre-schoolers having weaker muscles and balance, their muscle synergies are reorganizing themselves into groups of fewer muscles as they grow up. For adults, the picture is opposite: months to years of training may cause synergistic muscle groups to merge into units with more muscles, and these mergers have something to do with setbacks suffered by veteran runners: more often than not, the muscle group scoring low in efficiency is summoned inadvertently. The key to running farther and faster hence lies in picking up good muscle patterns, and suppressing not quite ideal ones through apposite training and practice.

Next time you’re running, work your muscles and brain up to feel like flying.