Authors
Joseph Hamill, Jiri Skypala, Jan Plesek, Jan Urbaczka, Lucie Sustkova, Daniel Jandacka
Published in
Medicine and science in sports and exercise. Sep 25, 2026. Epub Sep 25, 2026.
Abstract
In the last several years, a controversy has arisen between which type of footfall pattern, rearfoot versus non-rearfoot, incurs the fewest running-related injuries.
The primary aims of this paper were to determine if there are differences in the occurrence of running-related injuries between rearfoot and non-rearfoot footfall pattern runners and to determine if there would be differences between rearfoot and non-rearfoot footfall pattern runners in the number of injuries at different anatomical locations.
This study was a secondary analysis of the data collection from Healthy Aging in the Industrial Environment (4HAIE) study. The sub-sample of 1315 participants consisted of 738 runners (307 females/431 males) and parsed into rearfoot (N=591, 248 females/343 males) and non-rearfoot (N=147, 59 females/88 males) groups based on their strike index. The measurement protocol consisted of completing questionnaires and running biomechanics assessments. During the 1-year follow-up the running-related injury onset was derived from the weekly, self-initiated, and decreased activity questionnaires.
There was no statistically significant difference between the total percentage of injuries in the two footfall groups (p > 0.05) nor was the percentage of injuries at each anatomical location (p > 0.05) statistically significant. A logistic regression analysis showed no evidence of an association between footfall pattern and injury risk and that the odds of injury was the same in both groups.
Therefore, a runner's footfall pattern neither increases nor decreases the probability of injury.
PMID:
42789782
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 26 Sep 2026.
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