There are many scholarly articles about this topic. See attached, Excuse the fact that I changed the file names of these articles when I saved them to my personal folders. There may be more current articles than those I attached.

Hi John:

The definition of "strike" is "forceful contact." The location of forceful contact along the plantar surface with distance running is always at the heel region with distance running and near the digits when sprinting, regardless of the site of first contact. Biomechanists, in their intellectual solitude, have created confusion by using the word "strike" to mean the area of first contact according to visual records regardless of the intensity of loading. This makes this whole discussion rather meaningless because when considering injuries. The considerations regarding injury should be loading amplitude and location.

You use the term, "natural heel strikers." as mentioned above, all distance runners are natural heel strikers whether barefoot or shod due to the limitations of calf muscles to sustain continuous repeated intense loads associated with distance running. 

There is no evidence that injury incidence is low in shod running regardless of shoe type or point of first contact. This is not surprising considering that footwear were first worn by all classes of humans for with the European Renaissance and humans evolved barefoot. Considerable evidence is available which indicates that most footwear use followed the esthetic tradition of body art through foot decoration and always came as considerable cost to both health and mobility.

If the notion of natural selection is applied, humans had to be be capable of relatively injury free barefoot locomotion because limitations on mobility through injury would have impaired their survival, therefore would have been a selective disadvantage. This is confirmed by recent anecdotal reports which indicate relatively safe barefoot running even on most manmade substrates. Details of these arguments can be found at http://www.stevenrobbinsmd.com  

regards,

Steven Robbins

stevenrobbinsmd.com

Hi Tracey,

Thank you for those papers, there are a few there I haven't seen. Having had a quick look over them I am inclined to think the answer to my question is still 'no'. I am yet to see any 'good' evidence that forefoot running reduces injury....interesting!

Hi Steven,

Thank you for your response. Indeed the first barrier when trying to get into this topic is terminology. You can't talk about heel strike (first contact) vs forefoot strike (first contact) without the argument of shod vs barefoot clouding the issue (not made any better by me putting 'barefoot' in my question; but I thought as much of the literature confuses the two things I would put barefoot in the question too). To be clear I am interested in heel first contact vs forefoot first contact, and whether there is any good research to show that there is a reduced incidence of injury when forefoot running, especially if the people were trained to forefoot run having previously been a heel first contact runner.

I am very interested in a few of the argument you made: Have you got any evidence that 'all' distance runners are heel strikers? What are you defining as distance? I have recorded runners forefoot striking an entire 10km time trial, in fact I have done it myself? You only have to look at video of the Olympic 10km runners to see a small percentage forefoot striking. And I know people that have run both half and marathon distance on their forefoot.  

The natural selection argument is an interesting one. It is a key principle that evolution by natural selection does not come up within the 'best solution' to a problem, it comes up with solutions that are more of a survival advantage than the last. Bearing that in mind, it is perfectly reasonable that humans, or sport scientists, designed running shoes that are better for reducing injury than evolution did with barefoot running or they thought they were improving things and didn't. Both are possible that's why we need evidence.

Neither heel strike nor forefoot strike are efficient. In order to heel strike, you need to overstride, which will slow down a runner.  Forefoot landing puts enormous strain on the calf muscles.  This is why efficient runners land on the midfoot, pulling the foot back before landing to reduce overstride. More on stride efficiency can be found at http://www.somaxsports.com/video.php?analysis=running