 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Goyki. Today we're gonna discuss a question that is commonly presented to me from my clients. And that is, do you need to run to do cardio? The short answer is no, but there's some nuance here that we can kind of discuss. So running is probably the simplest type of cardiovascular exercise that you could perform. It doesn't require anything, but maybe some running clothes, unless you wanna sweat in whatever you're wearing, then you're just, you're totally prepared to go running. The complicated parts are a couple different things. So the first one is, are you prepared to run? So each step that you take, you land and resist your landing with about six times your body weight worth of force. So your knee isn't bending. That doesn't mean your knee and your hip isn't bending like a squat is what I mean. So it's not like you have to squat six times body weight to support all that, but you do have to coordinate the bending of multiple joints at the same time. And for some people, they don't have that strength to do that without the biggest compensation is arching your back. So people don't generally always have the ability to resist that impact without arching their back. This is where some of the persistent foot pain things can come into play. If I arch my back, I put more pressure on my toes, more of my body weight on my toes. I shift my center of mass forward. And doing that tenses the fascia on the bottom of the foot. So when you combine a flat, hard surface with an unprepared skeleton and well, musculoskeleton, and maybe with insufficient shoe protection, then your body wears down, you stress things and eventually it can't tolerate it anymore. It's just like a rubber band, right? I can stretch a rubber band and it will deform and then it will reform. We say it has elastic properties because it reforms after it stretches. But if I pull a rubber band far enough, it's just gonna crack and it's gonna break and it's gonna snap and it's never gonna be the same again. Our muscle tissue is like that. So for running, you have to think, is my body prepared for this? If you're running to get in shape, it's probably not the best way to do cardio. And you should look at other forms of lower impact cardio, like maybe just biking or you could do an elliptical or you could walk uphill on a treadmill, something that's still making you sweat, but something that's avoiding the repetitive impact that you get from running. The other option that you might wanna look into is some sort of circuit training. So I could do a variety of exercises, again, low impact stuff. That's one of the reasons that I really like the weight training is because each movement that you're doing is pretty low impact. Now, the problem is there is a little bit more technique involved. It's not just go for a run. So I need to make sure that I'm squatting correctly. I can't be squatting on my toes because then I'm just running into that same forward shifting kind of thing. And though I might not be stressing my foot quite as much because there's not as much impact on the ground with every step like I have in running, I might still stress my knees, for example, by putting too much pressure forward onto my knee joint. So you've gotta be technically proficient at the movements that you're doing. It has to be something where you don't have to think about your balance or whether or not you're pretty good at this thing. You can just kind of like put your head down and go and maybe not literally put your head down because usually you don't wanna stare at the ground when you're doing your exercises. So short answer, do I need to run to do cardio? No, but consider that running is a really easy way to just get going and get doing cardio. The kind of like summary explanation that I would give to a client is I don't want you to run to get into shape but if you're in shape already and you wanna stay in shape, running is a really good option.