Running: Greater Impact = Greater Chance of Injury
The harder your foot makes contact with the ground while running, the greater your chance of being injured. That much seems intuitive. What is counterintuitive is the high injury rates seen in runners, when running is an evolutionary trait developed for survival. Put another way, if running were essential for human survival, throughout the majority of history, we shouldn’t be getting injured while doing it (a trait that would have selectively been removed). If our ancestors kept injuring themselves while running from predators, we probably wouldn’t be here today, right?But we are here, and we get injured while running. A lot. We’re landing too hard…because runners with the greatest vertical impact are the ones who are most often injured.
To arrive at this conclusion, a group of scientists examined 249 female runners and measured the amount of vertical impact they were experiencing, looked at their mileage, then finally at their injury rates.* The injured group (144) was significantly larger than the uninjured (105) group.
What they found was that all impact-related measures were higher in those with injuries, as compared with the uninjured runners. Again, this seems intuitive (greater force on the ground means greater force acting on the joints and soft tissue), in as much as the fact that most of us cant run without getting injured seems counterintuitive.
The take home lesson? Run softer and you’ll get injured a lot less.
- Reference: Br J Sports Med doi:10.1136/bjsports-2015-094579 Greater vertical impact loading in female runners with medically diagnosed injuries: a prospective investigation.
