Changes

It seems intuitively obvious that a runner will know how their foot lands. However, it seems that runners are actually relatively poor at evaluating their foot strike. A study of 60 runners found that only 70% knew their foot strike<ref name="GossLewek2015"/>, while another study found that only 44% of recreational runners and 57% of collegiate cross-country runners knew their foot strike<ref name="Bade-2016"/>. This is in line with a study of 87 runners that showed only 69% were correct in their identification of their foot strike<ref name="Goss-2012"/>. Personally, I suspect that the extremes of foot strike are relatively easy to distinguish. A forefoot runner whose heel never touches the ground is pretty obviously a forefoot runner. Likewise, many runners are quite obviously extreme heel strikers. Between those extremes that becomes far more uncertainty, and a more objective measure becomes valuable. The two I think there are a few options I'm aware of for evaluating foot strike are high-speed video and the [[RunScribe]] Footpod. your Foot Strike:* High speed video can be quite effective, and the cameras are becoming far more accessible. The iPhone 6 and later will do 240 frames per second, but it still can be rather tricky which is enough to evaluategive a good evaluation of your foot strike.* There are a number of [[Running Sensors]] that will detect your Foot Strike. I 've found the [[RunScribe]] Footpod to be quite accurate when compared with high-speed video, though I've also had promising results from [[SHFT]]. * A common approach has been to look at the wear pattern on the sole of your running shoes. However, I've come to believe that this is extremely misleading as the wear on the bottom of your shoe has a far more to do with abrasion than it does pressure. For instance, I make initial contact with the ground with my heel, and when descending steeply, I tend to scrape the extreme edge of the heel. So, if you look at the outsole of my shoes you'd conclude that I am an extreme heel strike runner, but that's not an accurate conclusion.* Perhaps the cheapest, easiest option, and most useful approach however is to look at how the cushioning of your running shoes degrades. I've found consistently that my running shoes become compressed under the ball of my foot, which indicates this is the area of greatest loading. I have relatively little compression over the rest of the shoe, including no real compression under the heal, which suggests that I am a "proprioceptive heel strike" runner. I've found that I can see this degradation of the shoes cushioning most easily in the removable insole.[[File:Insole Wear and Foot Strike.jpg|none|thumb|300px|This is an insole where I've marked the area of compression, which is under the ball of my foot. It's hard to photograph the compression, but the it provides many other metrics's quite obvious to the touch.]]