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Relationships Among Self-reported Shoe Type, Footstrike Pattern, and Injury Incidence.
Goss DL, Gross MT.
US Army Med Dep J. 2012 Oct-Dec:25-30.

 

I wonder what percentage of barefoot/minimalist runners continue to run barefoot/minimalist after being injured???

 

What's up with this?

{ADMIN NOTE: Threads merged}

http://www.apta.org/PTinMotion/NewsNow/2012/9/27/NewLiterature/

Haven't they excluded the useful data? If someone is injured "barefoot" will they not switch back to traditional shoes and end up excluded from the study?

:sinking:

Conrad

 

Both are potential issues, but without more detail on how they recruited the subjects; the potential for recall bias; etc .... there are a lot of unanswered questions in the abstract and the full paper is not yet available. A red flag is this:

 

There is also the issue of distances run and there is no mention of that in the abstract to judge if the distances run between the forefoot and rearfoot strikers were the same. From the analysis in the abstract, they did not do anything to control for that as a confounder.

For eg, there is no data, but I certainly get the impression that barefoot/minimalist runners run less distances than those using the more traditional running shoe, so is the results presented above due to the foot strike pattern or due to the distances run … really need the full paper to evaluate

 

Hi everyone. First post.

Pete Larson answers most of the concerns raised in a post on his runblogger site. The reason so many respondents were excluded from the injury comparison was because they had either changed footwear type of foot strike in the past year. Of those that had switched shoes or foot strike in the past year due to injury, the "vast majority" switched from traditional running shoes and heel striking to forefoot striking in minimalist shoes. He also noted that the minimalist runners on the average were running greater weekly mileage and at faster training paces than the traditionally shod group.

http://www.runblogger.com/2012/10/minimalist-running-results-in-fewer.html

 

:welcome:

Thanks. I still have not yet got a copy of the full paper, but based on what Peter Larsen has posted on it (obviously he has got a copy), there is now more than enough information about the methods to dismiss the results of this study due to the unreliable and biased nature of the data collected (which both the authors and Peter Larsen acknowledged).

 

The biggest problem with this study is that they relied on runners being accurate in their knowledge of what type of foot strike pattern they possessed. Most runners don't have a clue as to how they foot strike, with many runners who think they are midfoot strikers being heel strikers.

It reminds me of:

....all the women who say they never wear shoes that are too small for their feet, only to find that all their toes are jammed against the end of all their shoes....

....all the men who think their looks are God's gift to mankind, only to see that their waist measurements exceed their chest measurements....

....all the contestants on American Idol who think they are great singers, only to see that their singing is best likened to someone scratching fingernails on a chalkboard....

:cool:

 

According to another study by the authors approximately 1/3 of runners misclassified their rearfoot strike pattern as an anterior strike. While that is a significant percentage it is far from "most" runners. And let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. There are still interesting results from this survey regarding injury rates versus footwear type regardless of the quality of the footstrike responses. I prefer to keep an open mind, at least until I actually get a chance to read the entire report myself.

 

Finally got the full paper and that is the case. The targeted and self selected nature of the sampling really does bias the data on one direction. They deliberately targeted minimalist runners who then self selected if they responded or not.

 

The Effect of Foot Strike in Female Runners
Courtney Dockry
Honors Research Projects. 634. The University of Akron