Stand up straight. Chin up, eyes forward. Some coaches suggest bending very slightly forward from the ankles (not the waist), as though you are “leaning into the finish line” but others recommend against this.
Tilt your pelvis forward. Thrust your hips forward by rolling your pelvis forward and up from the bottom.
Relax your shoulders. Arms should fall naturally down to waist level when held horizontally at your sides. If your shoulders won’t relax and stay down, try just pushing them down. One way or the other, your arms should pendulum from your shoulders’ lowest position.
Establish a rhythm. Try using the crunch of your front foot against the ground as a metronome. When your heel hits, your arms move, one forward, the other one back. Work on this at different speeds until that rhythm becomes an automatic part of your racewalking. If you get out of rhythm, slow down and get back into it. When that is established, then you can speed up just by speeding up your arms. You speed up your arm rhythm and your legs will surely follow! You may find that making a vocal sound as your heel hits helps you establish rhythm, especially on soft surfaces that render your foot strikes silent.
Flip your forward foot up and land slightly to the outside of your heel, with your toes right down in front of your body. In practice, it is so close that it feels almost as though you are landing straight down, rather than out in front. Almost all the foot and leg action in racewalking is behind the body. Landing too far out in front will cause your knees to bend. Land heel down, toes up and pull the ground back with your hip. When you land with your heel down, toes up, very close to your body and pull back strongly with the hip your knee on that side should automatically lock straight until it passes under your body. (Racewalking Rule #1)
To avoid a side-to-side hip sashay, keep your arms close in to your body and don’t allow your hip to collapse out to the side during your pull back. Twist with your hips to make your hip “open up” on the pulling-back side, as the other knee drives forward so that your heel comes around and lands very close to your body.
Try this experiment: With your left toe on a line, reach your right leg straight forward and plant your heel. Note where it lands. Now try the same thing again, but this time twist your hips counterclockwise, bringing your right heel around to land right in front of the other foot. You will notice that this “opens up” your hip area and adds an extra six inches or so to your stride length. That’s why we rotate our hips in racewalking. That extra six inches per step adds up very quickly!
Feel your weight shift from side to side. As you dig in and pull back on one side, all your weight is on that side, while your other foot is off the ground. Then, as your other heel digs in and pulls, your weight shifts to the other side, back and forth, back and forth, rolling along. Feel that; use it.
Work on achieving “active feet”, meaning that your ankles go through their entire range of motion, from toes up / heel down in front to toes down / heel up as you “toe off” in back.
Feel yourself “rolling” forward, propelling yourself with the pull back against the ground on one side and the propulsion off the toes on the other, as though you are just skimming over the ground, lightly touching down just enough with each step to keep going faster and faster.
Here’s something to try: the “Charlie Chaplin Checklist”. One racewalker we know has been using this 4-part checklist during his training racewalks to fine-tune his technique.
(1) Think of your heels as landing more beside your body than in front and feel all your weight shifting from side to side to side. Kind of a Charlie Chaplin “Little Tramp” side to side walk. Say “left-right-left-right” as you feel your weight shifting back and forth.
(2) Add the strongest hip pull on each side that you can muster. As your heel lands, pull the ground back under your body hard with your hip rotating back as far as you can possibly make it go. This will cause the hip on the other side to rotate forward. Do as much of this “hula-hoop” motion as you can manage. Say, “pull-pull-pull-pull” as you do it.
(3) Add active feet. Flip your feet, from the toe-up in front to the toe-off in back, using very mobile ankles to get as much motion as possible. Say, “flip-flip-flip-flip” as you do it.
(4) Add a vigorous arm movement. Try to keep everything going in unison as long as possible. Then start over at #1 again.
Stretching. For racewalking, it's important to be as flexible as possible, especially in the hips and legs. But old-fashioned, static stretching, where you pull out a relaxed muscle as far as it will go, may strain or tear muscle fibers. Static stretching of sore, damaged tissues can make an injury worse! Good alternatives are "dynamic flexibility" exercises and "eccentric" stretching. The former means moving the body part through a range of motion that provides a gentle stretch. For example, swinging your legs right and left or forward and back are dynamic exercises to increase flexibility. "Eccentric" stretching means pushing or pulling a muscle that you have contracted. The contraction protects the muscle and provides a better stretch. For examples of some eccentric stretches, see this video.
If you have any other tips that you think we should add to this page, please pass them along. Also, if you disagree with anything you find here, please let us know that, too. We intend to make changes to this page often, based on input from racewalkers.