Recognition of Foot Strike Pattern in Asian Recreational Runners

Abstract

Close to 90% of recreational runners rearfoot strike in a long-distance road race. This prevalence has been obtained from North American cohorts of runners. The prevalence of rearfoot strikers has not been extensively examined in an Asian population of recreational runners. Therefore, the aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of rearfoot, midfoot, and forefoot strikers during a long-distance road race in Asian recreational runners and compare this prevalence to reported values in the scientific literature. To do so, we classified the foot strike pattern of 950 recreational runners at the 10 km mark of the Singapore marathon (77% Asian field). We observed 71.1%, 16.6%, 1.7%, and 10.6% of rearfoot, midfoot, forefoot, and asymmetric strikers, respectively. Chi-squared tests revealed significant differences between our foot strike pattern distribution and those reported from North American cohorts (P < 0.001). Our foot strike pattern distribution was similar to one reported from elite half-marathon runners racing in Japan (Fisher exact test, P = 0.168). We conclude that the prevalence of rearfoot strikers is lower in Asian than North American recreational runners. Running research should consider and report ethnicity of participants given that ethnicity can potentially explain biomechanical differences in running patterns.

Footstrike pattern at the 10 km and 39 km points of the Singapore marathon in recreational runners

“…In contrast to our previous investigation (Patoz et al, 2019), this study observed no significant difference between the in-race position and footstrike pattern prevalence of runners at both the 10 km (p ¼ 0.60) and 39 km (p ¼ 0.57) marks of the marathon. This result contradicts the observation of Hasegawa et al (2007) and Kasmer et al (2013) that faster runners are more likely to MFS, but agree with other studies reporting no significant relationship between footstrike pattern and race performance (Hanley et al, 2019;Larson et al, 2011).…”

“…However, this prevalence approaches 90% in predominantly North American (Kasmer et al, 2013;Larson et al, 2011) and European (Latorre-Rom an et al, 2015) cohorts of recreational runners participating in long-distance road races. In contrast to such cohorts, we found a lower RFS prevalence (71%) and higher MFS prevalence (17%) at the 10 km mark of the Singapore marathon in a predominantly Asian cohort of recreational runners (Patoz et al, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, a considerably large cohort of runners might be necessary to define this relationship more clearly, and needs to comprise runners with a wide range of running abilities and varied footstrike patterns. Our previous sample was nearly 3 times greater (N ¼ 940 runners), and indicated that FFS tended to be faster, followed by MFS, SS, and RFS when grouped by 100 according to rank (Patoz et al, 2019). It is also possible that the non-significant monotonic evolution in D RFS, D MFS, D FFS, and D SS patterns with the in-race position of individuals results from individuals shuffling within groups (i.e.…”

“…As done previously (Patoz et al, 2019), we investigated differences in the position of individuals in race between the four footstrike patterns at both filming locations using nonparametric Kruskal-Wallis tests to determine whether footstrike was associated with in-race position. Finally, we evaluated D RFS, D MFS, D FFS, and D SS as a function of in-race position by grouping runners into groups of 50 consecutive participants, calculating the change in prevalence of each footstrike pattern for each group, and computing Spearman's rank correlation coefficient (r).…”

“…Consistent with our previous research (Patoz et al, 2019), the first 50 runners were not considered because they did not represent a predominantly Asian cohort (62% non-Asian runners) and were considered elite and sub-elite (finishing time range: 02:17:26 to 03:11:30 and average: 02:48:49 ± 00:18:40). The study received approval from our Institutional Review Board (ISNRP: 26/2015).…”