Running Tips for Outdoor Mostly Flat Surface - part of the women's fitness video series by GeoBeats. Running Tips for Outdoor Mostly Flat Surface Proper running on a mostly flat surface is pretty simple. You want to keep your head, shoulders, hips in alignment. So, my friend Sabra, here, is going to show us. We’re going to try to keep the head, shoulders and hips in alignment. You don’t want to bend your head forward, or you don’t want to look up. So, you want to, like I said, keep them in alignment. You also want to bend the elbows at about 90 degrees, like Sabra is doing here. You want to look down, not look down at your feet or up at the sky, you want to look down about 10 feet in front of you. So, Sabra’s going to look just past there, as if she was looking at the tip of her shadow. And that helps keep your spine in alignment, as well. As for leg motion, think about a train wheel, a train wheel chugging along. There are four parts to your stride. First of all, the high knee, the landing, push-off, and then butt kick. Now, of course, this is a slight exaggeration, the way I’m doing it. That’s generally the way your foot should land and then push off for the next stride. That push-off gives you the propulsion for the next step. Think about a train chugging along. That’s a good visual on proper running technique when you’re on a flat surface.