How many of you have come across avid runners for patients? Have they asked you question about their running gait? Feeling confident with answering their questions? If not, this post is for you.
With 36 million people running in the United states, running has become a big area of study. When it comes to running gait (running much like walking) it will vary from runner to runner according to specific muscle imbalances. For this reason, it is difficult to standardize the “Perfect Form” however there is research to support what “normal” running should closely resemble. Why is this important? It is important because within the running community there is an incident of injuries as high at 79%, most occurring at the knee. Therefore, you have to think along the lines that these athlete run hundreds of miles a year, there is a repetitive stress, and the ones that are injured may be moving sub-optimally. The purpose of this post is to introduce basic running mechanics so that we can further analyze gait in the next post.