Albert Pujols's Running Form

I had been meaning to discuss this about a week or so ago, but with the draft happening, I forgot about it. I was watching the St. Louis Cardinals play a baseball game when Albert Pujols came to the plate. If you don't know Pujols, he is their MVP candidate on an annual basis. A stud of a hitter. He proceeded to smack a weak grounder to third and ran to first as hard as he could.. He was called out, but Albert was noticeably limping after that run and was taken out of the game.

At the time, I made a tweet suggesting his running form could be improved. They replayed his run 5 or 6 times to see where he might have tweaked his leg. Here was my exact tweet after watching him run:

"Albert Pujols tweaks his leg running to first. He needs to learn to run. Get on the balls of your feet and strengthen your hamstrings." - April 24, 10:50pm.

Low and behold, it comes out the next day in the paper that he tweaked his hamstring running. I think he sat out a few games because of it.

So, let's review my tweet. The first thing I saw was Albert running on his heels. This is one of the more common errors I see when people run. Trying to sprint on your heels is not good. There isn't any padding on your heels and you send a myriad of shock waves up your leg because of this. You can generate more power by sprinting on the balls of your feet. This can be strengthened by repetitive drills or strengthening that area. Some people just can't get up on the balls of the feet efficiently.

The strengthening the hamstrings comment I made because as his foot/leg was exploding off the ground, you could see his hamstrings weren't getting much power. That movement basically is a leg curl and when you watch sprinters run, when their legs are cycling through they are almost kicking their own butt, they generate so much power. It was no surprise to me that he tweaked his hamstrings when he was running after watching him run.

Albert obviously has strong legs. Just look at them. He could spend more time on the hamstrings though. His other muscles - quads and glutes - are generating a lot of power and his hamstrings are struggling to keep up, that is why he tweaked them. If he strengthened his hamstrings, he would probably run faster and help with injury prevention.

I had recently talked about the glute ham machine being one of the most important machines out there for speed development. Hopefully, my breakdown of Albert's running form and his subsequent injury helps to illustrate that point just a little more.