I agree, as I have seen from any number of high level marathon runners, you can do quite well with a mild heel strike. What I don’t see most of these guys doing is the big extension at the knee so that the foot lands way in front of the knee at contact. I’m afraid that heel strike has become a bit of a dirty word so to speak, and it forces people to push too hard and hurt themselves by forcing the opposite extreme. I tend to believe that over striding is the bigger problem, and that foot strike is just one potential piece of that puzzle.

Pete

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Yes, and that’s a good point and it’s something that I hadn’t really considered before. Now that you’ve shown this, it looks like we need to redefine what good form is, which might or might not have anything to do with which 1/3 of the foot touched the ground first. This is interesting and I hope we can see more studies on how much and which muscles activate during impact.

I suspect you are probably right – lots of variation in how the foot
approaches the ground. Bikila is clearly starting to pull his foot back,
others do not.

Robin,

Thanks for sharing, good stuff! How did you like the conference in Shepherdstown?

Pete

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Mark,

Good questions – can’t think of a study that looks at leg positioning and
forces off the top of my head. Heiderscheit’s 2011 paper did look at stride
length, stride rate, and impact at the knee and hip:
https://runblogger.com/2010…

Need to go try an dig up some barefoot footage of Bikila now!

Pete

I’d like to see a test when habitually barefoot runners run on really soft ground. My guess is that they’ll still forefoot strike though…

It would also be fascinating to examine differences in the Bikala’s running stride between his barefoot Rome Olympic marathon run in ’60 and this excellent ’64 shod footage (I’d speculate that a he owed at least a portion of the ~4-minute faster shod Tokyo performance owing to slightly extending his stride via relying on the heel resiliency of his Puma shoes.)

Sean,

Proprioreceptive heel strike is what I would call it as well. Foot strike is consistently defined in the literature as point of first contact, so to be consistent that is why I call this a heel strike. Nut, as we are discovering, foot strike is a spectrum rather than a set of categories, and forces do not always correlate with kinematics. I would also point out that if you make contact on the heel, it will cause some torque about the ankle forcing the foot to plantar flex. You can see this a few times in the Bikila video.