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“The heel strikes back” 

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

You can learn a lot from watching a lot of elite runners with a lot of high-speed cameras. And much of what you learn is a surprise. For instance, most elite runners are actually heel-strikers, which flies in the face of the popular belief that the best runners are forefoot strikers. Alex Hutchinson:

In the men’s marathon, the top four finishers, hailing from Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Great Britain, were all heel strikers during all four laps of the race. … The claim that the best runners in the world land on their toes should be abandoned in the face of the new data.”

Excellent bias-confirming fodder for an update to my barefoot/minimalist running article. And there’s much more here: Lessons from Watching the World's Best Runners.

PainSci Member Login » Submit your email to unlock member content. If you can’t remember/access your registration email, please contact me. ~ Paul Ingraham, PainSci Publisher