UrbanUpdate

If you've been running often enough—which, for the sake of your own longevity and happiness, I hope you're doing—you may eventually arrive at a point where the omnipresent aches and needling pains that accompany your dutiful pavement-pounding expeditions are making the entire ordeal into the wrong kind of unpleasant. The good news is that before you grimly shrug your shoulders and resign yourself to living a sedentary lifestyle from this point forward, there exists a simple (and free!) fix that you should probably try first: changing your step rate.

Your step rate, as you might cleverly intuit from its name, is the rate at which you take each step during your run. It is one of two primary factors, along with stride length, that determines your overall speed. (Set aside, for the moment, things like terrain type, incline, and how damn tired you are.) Researchers have consistently found that increasing one's step rate while simultaneously decreasing the length of each step—in order to hold speed constant—can significantly reduce the impact of distance running on those precious, fragile joints. In one study, scientists found that increasing the runner's step rate by only 5 percent over their preferred frequency caused a 20 percent drop in the amount of energy absorbed by the knee, and they observed similar reductions in the type of excessive hip motion that, unchecked, can cause things like knee pain and/or IT band syndrome. Basically, shorter stride lengths keep the knees positioned more firmly underneath the runner's center of mass, which in turn reduces the need for the knee to "brake" when the foot lands further out in front of the body.

It's important to remember that churning your legs a little faster will only make a difference if you tighten up your stride, too, so think about taking choppier, rapid-fire paces instead of just completing your usual ones at a more aggressive clip. (This may shock you, but bumping up your rate and keeping length constant, thereby artificially edging your gait uncomfortably closer to a sprint speed, is not a recommended method for giving aching body parts a rest.) Although taking more steps will necessarily result in more "loading cycles"—the overall number of times that you put force on the knee during each run—the effects of this marginal change are not significant enough to offset the overall reduction in joint stress associated with step rate manipulation. If you listen to music while working out, cobbling together a playlist of songs with higher BPMs than you're used to can be helpful as you make the adjustment.

Interestingly, researchers have noted that many of the positive changes associated with a higher step rate correspond with those observed in runners wearing "minimalist" footwear that supposedly facilitates a more natural running motion. So if nagging injuries have prompted you to consider investing in some expensive footwear, I present to you yet another reason to try increasing your step rate first: You might just get to experience all the purported benefits of toe shoes, without... well, the toe shoes.

Watch Now:Usain Bolt, Champion Runner... and Dancer?Jay Willis is a staff writer at GQ covering news, law, and politics. Previously, he was an associate at law firms in Washington, D.C. and Seattle, where his practice focused on consumer financial services and environmental cleanup litigation. He studied social welfare at Berkeley and graduated from Harvard Law School... Read moreRelated Stories for GQRunningRunning