If you’ve ever Googled a running injury at 11pm, you’ve probably landed on an article insisting your form is the problem. Fix your cadence, land differently, stop heel striking, and everything will be fine. It’s tempting advice because it feels fixable. The truth is a little more layered than that, and here at Richmond Blundell Physiotherapy & Sports Injury Clinic, running injury physiotherapy is one of the things we spend the most time on, precisely because it rarely comes down to just one thing.
Your form absolutely plays a role. But it’s one piece of a bigger puzzle that includes how much you’re running, how quickly you increased it, how well you’re sleeping, and how much other stress your body is carrying. Let’s look at the form mistakes that tend to cause trouble, how to correct them, and why fixing your stride alone won’t always solve the problem.
The Running Form Mistakes We See Most Often
Overstriding
This is the big one. Overstriding happens when your foot lands too far in front of your body’s center of mass, rather than landing closer to underneath your hips. When your leg is extended way out in front of you at landing, that foot acts almost like a brake with every single step, and your knee and shin absorb a sharp jolt of impact force instead of your leg working like a spring.
Over thousands of steps per run, that repeated braking force adds up. Overstriding is commonly linked to shin splints, patellofemoral pain (that ache around or behind the kneecap), and stress reactions in the tibia.
How to correct it: Rather than consciously trying to change your foot strike, focus on increasing your cadence, the number of steps you take per minute. Aiming for a slightly quicker, shorter stride naturally pulls your foot strike back underneath your body without you having to think about “where” your foot lands. Most runners find a five to ten percent increase in cadence meaningfully shortens their stride and reduces impact loading.
Heel Striking vs. Forefoot Striking
This one gets more attention than it probably deserves. Heel striking isn’t inherently bad, and forefoot striking isn’t automatically better. What matters more is where your foot lands relative to your body, not which part of your foot touches down first. A heel strike that lands underneath your hips is very different from a heel strike that lands way out in front of you.
That said, each strike pattern does shift load to different muscle groups. Heel striking tends to place more load through the knee and shin. Forefoot and midfoot striking shift more load onto the calf and Achilles tendon. This is exactly why we see certain injuries cluster with certain patterns.
How to correct it: If you’re a committed heel striker with recurring knee or shin pain, working on cadence (see above) often resolves the issue without needing to force a completely different strike pattern. If you’ve recently switched to forefoot striking and developed calf or Achilles tightness, that’s your body telling you the transition happened faster than your tendons could adapt. Slow it down.
Excessive Vertical Bounce
Some runners generate a lot of up-and-down motion with every stride, essentially wasting energy bouncing rather than moving efficiently forward. Beyond being inefficient, a lot of vertical oscillation increases the total impact force your body absorbs on landing, stride after stride.
How to correct it: Cues like “run quietly” or imagining you’re running under a low ceiling can help reduce excessive bounce. Strengthening your hips and glutes also gives you better control through the stance phase, which tends to smooth out an overly bouncy stride.
Crossover Gait
This is when your feet land close to or across an imaginary line down the center of your body, rather than landing with some natural width apart, almost like running on a tightrope. It creates extra rotational stress through the hips and knees with every step.
Crossover gait is often connected to IT band syndrome and hip pain, since the hip and outer knee structures have to work harder to control that inward collapse.
How to correct it: Hip strengthening, particularly the glute medius, is the most effective long-term fix here, since a crossover pattern is frequently a strength and control issue rather than a habit you can simply think your way out of. Cueing a slightly wider step width during easy runs can help in the short term.
Poor Trunk Posture
Running with your torso overly hunched forward, or leaning back from the hips, changes how force travels through your entire kinetic chain. A collapsed posture can limit hip extension and put extra strain on your lower back, while an overly upright, leaned-back posture often goes hand in hand with overstriding.
How to correct it: A slight forward lean from the ankles, not the waist, keeping your chest tall and your core gently engaged, tends to set up the rest of your stride mechanics well. Core and postural endurance work off the run supports this over time.
Why Form Is Only One Piece of the Puzzle
We could correct every mechanical fault on this list, and you could still get injured. Running injuries are rarely caused by biomechanics alone. They’re usually the result of load exceeding what your tissues are currently prepared to handle, and form is just one factor that influences that equation.
Training Load and Volume
The single biggest predictor of running injury isn’t your stride, it’s how much and how quickly you increased your running. Jumping your weekly mileage up too fast, adding speed work before your legs adapted to easy running, or stacking back-to-back hard efforts without recovery all overload tissues faster than they can strengthen. A general guideline is to increase weekly volume by no more than about ten percent, though even that’s a rough rule of thumb rather than a hard rule for every runner.
Total Life Stress
Your body doesn’t separate training stress from work stress, financial stress, or emotional stress. It all draws from the same recovery capacity. A demanding stretch at work or a period of poor sleep can lower your tolerance for the exact same training load that felt manageable a month earlier, even if your running hasn’t changed at all.
Sleep
Sleep is when a huge amount of tissue repair and adaptation happens. Consistently shortchanging sleep leaves your tendons, muscles, and bones less prepared to handle the demands you’re placing on them, which is part of why injuries often cluster during busy, under-slept periods of life rather than lining up neatly with training changes.
Strength and Capacity
Two runners can have nearly identical form and completely different injury outcomes, because one has the hip, calf, and core strength to control that form under fatigue, and the other doesn’t. Strength training builds the tissue capacity that lets your body tolerate running load, including the load created by less-than-perfect mechanics.
Footwear and Surface Changes
Switching shoes, moving from road to trail, or suddenly adding a lot of hill running all change the demands on your body, even if your form stays exactly the same. New stimulus needs a gradual introduction, the same way volume does.
Previous Injury History
An area that’s been injured before often stays more vulnerable, even after symptoms resolve, especially if strength and control weren’t fully restored during recovery. This is one of the most common reasons we see the same injury return.
Putting It Together: A More Complete Approach
When you come into Richmond Blundell Physiotherapy & Sports Injury Clinic with a running injury, we’re not just watching you run on a treadmill and pointing out form flaws. We’re looking at the full picture:
- Your current symptoms and injury history, to understand what tissue is irritated and why.
- Your training load, including recent changes in volume, intensity, and surface.
- Your strength and movement control, particularly through the hips, calves, and core.
- Your running mechanics, assessed in the context of everything above, not in isolation.
- Your recovery factors, including sleep, stress, and overall life load.
From there, we build a plan that might include gait retraining cues, a progressive strengthening program, and practical guidance on how to structure your training so your body can actually keep up with your goals.
An Encouraging Takeaway
If you’re dealing with a running injury, it doesn’t mean your form is fundamentally broken, and it doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your stride from scratch. Most of the time, it means one or more pieces of the puzzle, whether that’s load, strength, recovery, or a specific mechanical pattern, need some attention. The pieces are all things you can work on.
If a nagging injury keeps interrupting your training, or you want a proper assessment before it becomes a bigger problem, book an appointment with our Richmond team. We’ll help you figure out what’s actually going on and build a plan that gets you back to consistent, comfortable running.