Want to know how to avoid some
running injuries? Step lightly. That’s the advice coming through New York Times health columnist Gretchen Reynold’s report on research conducted at Harvard Medical School. The researchers followed 249 female runners –all heel-strikers– for two years, recording their injuries and trying to correlate injuries with their impact loads, meaning the force with which their feet hit the ground. Reynolds tells us that during the two-year period, more than 100 runners were injured badly enough to seek medical advice, and 40 others had minor injuries. Then there were the 21 runners who had no injuries. In fact, those 21 runners reported that they had never had a running-related injury. What’s up with that? When the researchers looked further, they found that the never injured runners, as a group, landed more lightly than those runner who had been injured. OK, what to do? Reynolds passes on advice from the study’s lead author: to land more lightly, try taking smaller strides, landing closer to the mid-foot; and/or try increasing your cadence.
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