Overstriding in Running: How to Spot It and Fix It

Every step, your foot lands somewhere relative to your body. Land close to under your hips, with the shin near vertical and the knee slightly bent, and the leg is ready to take your weight. Land far out in front, with the knee almost straight and the shin leaning forward, and each step works a little like a brake.

Overstriding isn't the same as heel striking. Heel striking is which part of the foot touches first; overstriding is where the foot lands relative to your body. You can land on your heel with the foot close under you, and you can reach far out in front and land on your forefoot.

Mostly, braking. In a study of 14 runners, the further in front of the hip the foot landed, the bigger the braking force, and landing further in front of the knee went with higher impact peaks. The authors suggested landing “with a relatively vertical tibia” — a shin close to vertical (Lieberman 2015 (opens in a new tab)).

A treadmill study of novice female runners found the same pattern: how far the heel landed in front of the body's centre of mass and step length — with speed and foot-strike angle — explained 37–54% of the variation in impact loading and braking force. The shin angle itself added nothing once those were counted (Napier 2019 (opens in a new tab)). So the shin angle is a handy thing to see on video — a marker of where the foot lands — rather than the whole story.

The link to injuries is less direct. These are loading measures, not injury outcomes, and no single form fault reliably predicts who gets hurt. Treat overstriding as a way to run with less braking and less load per step, not as a diagnosis.

• Reaching for speed. Lengthening the stride by throwing the foot forward, instead of pushing the ground away behind you.
• A low cadence. At the same speed, fewer steps per minute means longer steps — and longer steps usually land further in front.
• Sitting back. With your hips behind you, even a normal-length step lands in front of them.
• Fatigue. Late in a run, posture fades and many runners start to reach.
• Downhills. Some reach is natural going downhill, and it's easy to overdo.

You can't feel overstriding well, but you can see it. Clinicians use side-on video for exactly this: a published framework for 2D running analysis checks whether the ankle lands in front of the pelvis and whether the shin is angled forward as the foot takes weight (Souza 2016 (opens in a new tab)).

1. 1Set up side-on. Phone at hip height, upright and still, far enough back that a few full strides fit in frame with your feet visible — the setup FormLens asks for running. Put it on your right as you run past, so you cross the screen from left to right.
2. 2Run past at your easy pace. Not race pace: the pace you do most of your running at.
3. 3Pause at each landing. Step through to the frame where your foot first touches down.
4. 4Check the shin. Imagine a line straight down from your knee. If your ankle is well in front of it, the shin is leaning forward — a sign you're reaching.
5. 5Check the hips. Note where the foot lands relative to your hips. This is the check that confirms an overstride: a foot far in front of them is the braking pattern from the research above.
6. 6Count your cadence. Count your steps for 30 seconds and double it — or let FormLens count them from the same clip.

Change the step, not your whole running style. Small, gradual changes are easier to keep than big ones, which feel awkward.

• Raise your cadence 5–10%. Start from your own cadence at an easy pace — not a magic 180 — and add about 5%, with a metronome app to keep time. In a lab study, a 5% increase reduced the energy absorbed at the knee, and 10% at the hip as well (Heiderscheit 2011 (opens in a new tab)); a systematic review found that higher step rates consistently reduced vertical bounce and loading (Schubert 2014 (opens in a new tab)). More in running cadence explained.
• Land under you. Cues like “quick feet”, “step down, not out” or “land under your knee” bring the foot back toward your body.
• Run tall. Hips under you, a slight forward lean from the ankles, not from the waist.
• Drills: A-skips, high-knee marches and a few relaxed 15–20-second strides after an easy run teach a quick landing under the body.
• Change gradually. Use the new cadence for part of each run and build up over a few weeks. Don't raise mileage or intensity in the same weeks.

Film side-on at hip height, feet in frame for a few strides, at a steady easy pace (how to film), with the phone on your right as you run past — so you cross the screen from left to right. FormLens finds your foot strikes from the way your ankles move, and the results screen shows:

• Landing Mechanics: your shin angle at landing — the forward lean of your shin as each foot lands, averaged over the clip. More than 10° reads as “Overstriding detected”; 10° or less as good landing mechanics. Filmed right to left, an overstride shows as a negative angle and passes as good — re-film from your right before you trust a green result.
• Cadence: steps per minute, on a gauge that shades 160–180 as typical. That band is a reference, not a target — change your cadence relative to your own baseline.
• Bounce: how far your hips rise and fall per stride, in centimetres. The gauge shades 5–10 cm as typical, and more than 12 cm is flagged as high bounce.
• Flight and ground contact: how much of each stride you spend in the air and on the ground.

If FormLens can only track one leg — the far leg hidden behind the near one, for example — it mirrors that leg so the step count still covers both feet. If it can't find any steps at all, it tells you and asks you to film again, rather than showing zeros.

Film the same stretch at the same easy pace each time so the numbers compare, and read the shin angle alongside your own frame-by-frame check: where the foot lands relative to your hips matters more than the angle alone. The AI coach reads these numbers for your form score.

• Foot lands close to under your hips
• Shin close to vertical as the foot lands
• Cadence 5–10% above your old baseline, not a fixed number
• Running tall, hips under you
• One change at a time
• Filmed at the same spot and pace as last time