Coaching Philosophy
Who is Larissa Kleinmann?
This is my life story..... buckle up!
Track & Field
I started running at the tender age of four in my home country Germany. My father was a doctor of sports medicine and an avid marathon runner. I loved watching TV as a kid. In order to be allowed to watch TV, my dad forced me to run one loop around the neighborhood each day. Since I did not want to miss anything, I ran as fast as I could during the commercial break. Each day, I also rode my bike as fast as I could to school because I never made it out of bed early enough to ride slowly. Success in middle and long distance running came fast and so I became and stayed a member of the German national team until the day I retired from running.
Letters with full scholarship offers from various NCAA Div 1 universities flew into my post box long before I graduated from high school. I chose Boston University but transferred to become an Arkansas Razorback after my freshman year. I wanted to contend for team championships, not just individual crowns, at the highest NCAA level.
Despite countless Southeastern Conference individual and team title as well as 5 All-American honors in cross country, indoor track, and outdoor track, I decided to forego my last outdoor season and retired in 2003 instead of turning pro. I was injured at the time, but I primarily retired because running was not my sport. Too many traumatizing defeats had burnt me out not just physically but especially mentally.
Coaching Philosophy - Evolution
The longer FLUGPHASE exists, the further my training and coaching philosophies divert from how I trained and was coached as an athlete. I gave my first ever running technique workshop January 3rd 2013 in Frankfurt, Germany. Since that day, I have devoted my life into teaching running biomechanics full-time. I have improved the running techniques of more than 18.000 runners in in-person workshops throughout Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Luxemburg. I give around 200 workshops per year. I have become a biomechanics freak and human x-ray machine by turning thousands of hobby joggers into lightfooted gazelles and observing them closely in the process.
Experimentation to uncover hidden talent
My life changed in 2012 when I met the scientists behind running shoe company Newton Running. Newton’s scientists explained to me the biomechanics and physics behind the motion of running. I was sitting there shaking my head in disbelief. Everything was so logical. Why did nobody tell me any of this when I was a runner on the national team or student-athlete in the NCAA? That was the day when I realized I knew nothing about running. I decided it was time for me to erase all of the beliefs I had been given by my coaches and start searching for the truth. That was also the day of my return to the running world after I had spent the previous 7 years far away and deep inside the world of professional cycling.
It was time to find the truth about the human body, the truth about sports science, and the truth about how to train effectively: little input, big output. Work smart, not hard. You can only find the truth by making experiments, creative experiments that seem unrelated to your goal at first sight. Only experimenting into all directions leads to experience and knowledge. If you don’t try, you cannot know and will never know. If you don’t try, you will never expand your skills nor evolve. If you don’t try, you will never be able to uncover your own hidden talents or the hidden talents of others.
Running Technique - Underrated by coaches and athletes.
Almost none of what I teach my gazelles I knew prior to 2013. I thought running performance was all about biochemistry, because that was what all of the coaches I ever had taught me. That is what sports scientists still tell you. Today, I know better: just because someone had success with something and just because everyone does it, doesn’t mean that it is the best or most effective way to do it. I have come to realize that biochemistry is quite unimportant. What matters most is how you move and how Physics impact your movement. Prior to 2013, I had no awareness whatsoever how important running technique was because none of the coaches I had – including national coaches and coaches who brought out world-class runners – talked about running form. Let alone did they actively work on improving our running forms. No, doing high-knees, A skip, B-skip, etc. etc. is NOT working on your running form.
Biomechanics over Biochemistry
The prerequisite for being able to run efficiently and healthily is full-body athleticism, flexibility, and mobility. Your body needs to be able to move freely and stabilize itself. You don’t train that by clocking junk miles or doing intervals or runing x amount of time in zone 1,2 , 55, 87 or zone 552. My favorite proof – among many - of how unimportant biochemistry is, is the story of a customer: due to an injury she could not do any kind of endurance training for 6 months; all she did was 1 hour of hula-hoop per day instead. When she returned to running after half a year off, she was running 45s/k faster than before her break: 5:30min/k instead of 6:15min/k. Zero cardio training for half a year. Purely core stability and hip mobility training through hula-hoop which lead to a better running technique, saving energy, and thus becoming much faster despite worsened cardio fitness.
Sports scientists love to focus on developing aerobic endurance and anaerobic endurance; they have you do different workouts that aim at improving your maximum oxygen intake; they have you run at calculated paces over carefully calculated distances so your aerobic-anaerobic threshold would improve by a second or two or five per kilometer. Small improvements with a lot of work. Purely cardio work, purely running. Why would you focus on something that creates a low return on investment: lots of work for little improvement over long periods of time when there are methods that create big improvement in no time with hardly any effort? Be smart and start using Physics to your advantage instead of disadvantage by improving the way you move.
Over the years of in-person coaching more than 18.000 runners, 5 things stuck out to me that that make or break running economy. I call them “The 5 Factors of Flying”. My coaching philosophy revolves around those 5 factors. I developed practical exercises that teach how to execute each factor in a simple manner that does not require any coordinative super talent to do. With time, I have learned which instructions to give to who so every person succeeds in improving his/her running technique. I have learned how certain types of people react to certain types of instructions. I have learned what the common mistakes are and how to fix them in an instant. In FLUGPHASE’s online running technique courses, you will learn:
Status Quo of the average runner
The common violations against the Laws of Physics and Human Anatomy that are prevalent among runners. What an average runner (at least 90%) does, what makes no sense and why it makes no sense. Physics and anatomy explained in a way that everybody understands.
5 Factors of Flying
The physics and anatomical theory behind the 5 Factors of Flying. What makes you run more economically/healthier and why.
Practical technique exercises
4 simple but effective practical exercises to execute the 5 factors. The exercise have nothing to do with the plyometrics T&F athletes do. Many common T&F exercises actually harm your motion pattern and require extraordinary coordinative skills that most recreational runners do not have. FLUGPHASE’s mantra: make it simple and make it effective. Little investment for big returns.
Common execution mistakes
the common mistakes people make in the attempt to improve their running form; and how to fix those common execution mistakes
Personal Video Analysis
the opportunity to have your running form analyzed by me personally. In a 1-on-1 online coaching session we meet in person and analyze your technique together through screen share. I give you exercises and instructions depending on what we find. The analysis includes both the evaluation of your running economy but also the search for possible injury causes. We look closely at instabilities, dysbalances or blockages you may have in different parts of your body.
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Course Content
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Effective coaching: Finding the right buttons
Often times, it is not some technique exercise that makes people execute the desired motion. It is what you tell people that explodes the knot in their brains. Example: simply telling people they should not see their running shoes while running has proven to be much more effective than giving them the technique exercise that trains the correct motion pattern. The secret of coaching motion patterns is to find the right buttons to press in people’s brains. The buttons do not look exactly the same and are not located in the same spot in every brain. If you coach Thousands and pay close attention to their behavior, your coaching concept becomes more and more efficient. If you do it right, you only need an hour or two of coaching running biomechanics, and the formerly lethargic elephant leaves as a lightfooted gazelle that no one recognizes. Efficient coaching works magic.
Effective coaching: You gotta know how it feels like
There is one prerequisite for being a good biomechanics coach: you need to have good technique yourself because you need to know how it feels like when you do it right. When you do it right, you feel which muscles you have to activate how in order to get your body parts into the positions they need to be in. If you don’t know how it feels like to move right, you cannot teach other people how to move right. Feeling the body is the base for biomechanical coordination. Some do not realize what or how they feel. It is then my job to wake up their brains and trigger awareness. Once humans are aware, they also feel. Once they feel, they can coordinate their bodies.
