Salomon biomechanists Dr. Simon Bartold and Dr. Marlene Giandolini sit down in the biomechanics lab to discuss the merits of forefoot and rear foot striking while running. Plus, get their thoughts on how altering your training can help prevent some of the injuries that come with the repetitive motion of running.
There is plenty of discussion on running blogs and various other online forums debating whether one way to foot strike is better than the other. In most cases, forefoot striking is what people argue in favor of. At Salomon, this is an area the running footwear team studies closely. To help you better understand the topic, we asked Salomon biomechanists Dr. Simon Bartold and Dr. Marlene Giandolini to explain.
Let’s start by defining a rear foot striker and a forefoot striker. A simple explanation is this:
A rear foot striker makes first contact with the ground using the rear part of his or her foot. A forefoot striker strikes with the front part of the foot first.
Giandolini and Bartold don’t believe the debate over what is the “best” method of foot strike is the correct one. By changing your running style, they say, you are simply moving the location and intensity of the load applied to your body from running.
“After all, you can’t create or destroy force, you can only shift it,” Bartold explains. Striking first on the rear part of the foot reduces the load at the Achilles tendon, while a forefoot strike reduces the load on the knee. Giandolini and Bartold believe there is no “one-size fits all” for every runner.
“We all learn to run at a very early age, and it’s very hard-wired and very hard to change,” Bartold says. ”Unless you are injured, and then the rules change.”
When you are healthy, don’t be eager to change anything in your running style. If you are getting injured, changing your style could be an option. To prevent injuries, one tactic is to add diversity to the way you train. If you are a road runner, trail running could be a good way to find this variety. By doing things like trail running, where you are running on different surfaces and in different directions, you are avoiding repetitive load, which is the great enemy of the runner.
“A lot of what we hear about forefoot versus rear foot striking can be applied to elite runners,” Bartold says. “One of the ways to run faster as an ‘elite’ is to get the load up onto your forefoot. That helps you go faster. But most people are not ‘elite’ runners.”
In fact, what people perceive of their own foot strike pattern is often not what is really happening when they run. A recent Runner’s World study of more than 160,000 every day and elite runners revealed that 40 percent of people thought they were heel strikers, 43 percent midfoot strikers and 17 percent forefoot strikers. In reality, when analyzed during running, 94 percent of these same runners were heel strikers, four percent midfoot strikers and just two percent were forefoot strikers. At the recent Footwear Biomechanics Symposium in Australia, Dr. Martyn Shorten reported on this data and commented, “There are no normal foot strike patterns, there is just variation of a continuum.”
What does all this mean to you?
“We tend to recommend not to change your running style too much unless you are dealing with injuries,” Bartold says. “Then, it’s very important to get advice from an expert on biomechanics or a medical professional to be sure you are doing so in the correct manner.”
