French researchers have shown that our personality type can largely influence our running style.
- A team of French scientists suggests that the style of running we unwittingly adopt is closely linked to our personality type.
- After putting 80 volunteers through physical and behavioral tests, researchers found that those with the same personality types tended to have the same running styles.
- For example, runners with “an intuitive personality” would be more likely to “use their legs as springs, leading them to have a running type considered more springy”, while those with “a sensory personality type” would tend to “focus more on pushing forward.”
Tell us how you run, and we’ll tell you who you are? A team of French scientists, specialists in the biomechanics of the human body, suggests that the style of running that we unwittingly adopt is closely linked to our personality type. His work was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
Running style crossed with personality type
“Some run smoothly, with apparent ease, while others run clumsily, stiffly, as if the task were uncomfortable for them, explain the researchers in a communicated. If these differences in style seem to be based largely on physical attributes – athletes in particular have a more natural style – they could also be influenced by the personality of the runner.
To verify their hypothesis, scientists from Volodalen SportLab, a movement and motor skills training organization, conducted an experiment on 80 healthy adults. The volunteers had to run a 50-meter track three times, each time varying their speed, all filmed by the scientific team. At the same time, they took the famous 16 personalities test called MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator), a tool used by many psychologists to assess the characters of patients. As a reminder, the test results classify a person according to four categories: thinking-feeling, sensing-intuition, judgment-perception and extroversion-introversion.
An intuitive personality, therefore a more elastic stride
By comparing stride styles captured on video and categorizations assigned by the MBTI test, researchers found that participants “having certain personality types tended to have the same running styles as those with similar personality traits”. In other words, he can “Effectively” exist a link between stride and character.
For example, they noticed that runners with “an intuitive personality” were more likely “to use their legs as springs, which leads them to have a type of running considered more elastic”. Another lesson: joggers having “a sensory personality type” tended to “to focus more on pushing forward rather than how they might use their body to get to the finish line.”
