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Does how you run increase your risk of a stress fracture? In this video, I go over all the factors that go into why we run the way we run, how our anatomy impacts our running cadence, and how we can do a better job of helping runners navigate collegiate running.
Did my running form lead to my stress fracture? Runners are often concerned about their form. I get inquiries all the time about a runner that wants me to watch them run, to see if they have any inefficiencies or if the way that they run is leading to some poor performances or some injuries. Running forms is a complex topic, it can be confusing and overwhelming. And I wanted to dive into one specific thing today and how it relates to bone stress injuries. While running form can be a component of an injury. There's often a lot more things that we need to look into. Specifically when we get into bone stress injuries. There was a paper that was published a few weeks back that looked at if step rate, cadence, which is one component of running form is a component of why someone might develop bone stress injury. Now we need a lot of research when it comes to managing and preventing bone stress injuries.
We're not very good at dealing with these, and we're certainly not very good at preventing them. So this kind of research is absolutely warranted. Now they had these runners run at a moderate intensity pace and took a bunch of data from them. So they have a fancy treadmill and a bunch of imaging software, and then they tracked him for awhile. Now, when the study was done with they found out, was it the runners that had a lower step rate, had a higher risk of developing a bone stress injury. Again, an important study, but I think a little worrisome when it comes to how we take that information and put that into real people. So let's examine what step rate is and what might be going into why certain runners move in different ways.
Now, The first thing that we need to understand with step rate is that it's not a static number. Just because you run at the 170 steps per minute when you look down at your watch, doesn't necessarily mean that that's your step rate always. Step rate is going to be effected by how fast or slow we run, if we're tired, if we're navigating different terrains, if I'm running on a road versus running on a single track. And throughout the course of my life, it's probably going to change. We see that when we analyze high school runners, as they run more often from high school, their step rate actually increases. We see that collegiate runners tend to have a higher step rate than a high-school runners. So it's not a static number. It's not what we do always. And it's probably not what we're always going to be. Our step rates probably going to change throughout our live.
The second thing I think is important with step rate, is that a lot of it is defined by our anatomy. I actually did a blog post on this a couple of years ago, where I looked at two of my clients that run it similar paces, but are very different heights. What we find is that runners that have longer bones tend to have lower step rates and runners that have shorter bones tend to have higher step rates. There's certainly an anatomy component to this where, however your up is going to have an influence on your step rate. And that's probably not going to be something we need to necessarily change. Changing our step rate can be very helpful. Elizabeth Boyer and colleagues at Iowa State have found that if we increase our step rate by five to 10%, it can be really helpful in decreasing some strain on our knee and other structures that we might be dealing with pain.
So if a runner is dealing with knee pain and they have a really low step rate, a simple solution for them can be to increase their step rate by five to 10%. It's a way for us to shift forces around. Why are we talking about this in the context of bone stress injuries? If we go back to other videos that I've done, one of the key components of bones is that they're always changing and our bones are affected by everything that we do. One of the components is stress. There was a really great study by Wippert in 2017, looked exactly into this and how there's a plausible relationship between being in a highly stressful situation and that having a negative impact on our skeleton.
Often we think about them as you ran too much, too fast. Training and certainly be a component of them, but it's the overall ecosystem that that person is in and how that's going that I think plays a much bigger role in their injury than the things that we often associated with. A practical takeaway from this. There's a great resource that was developed by Emily Kraus and colleagues called the modified female athlete triad risk assessment.