Do you believe this? Scientific study: Running on trails isn't any better for your legs/injury prevention than the roads

WOW. As I nearly fell out of my chair.

ofa lon teh

hmmmmmmm wrote:

WOW. As I nearly fell out of my chair.

ofa lon teh

lmao of course the first reply would be to troll rojo

Keep it on the crete'!

Hasn't malmo been saying this for like 20 years?

Doesn't surprise me at all. Trail running is quite over hyped. And some trail runners are quite snobbish about it.

You probably get different injuries on trails but trail running is not "better" than road running for avoiding injuries.

I just have to think at all these mountain goats who bomb downhill for 3-4000ft at a time in mountain ultras. I know a couple of runners who can't run anymore because of that.

Of course if you run 100+ miles on roads for years that all adds up too.

Get back to me after the “researchers” have run 140 mpw. When you run on dirt after running on concrete during some 140-mile weeks, the difference is extremely noticeable. Virtually every week there’s a “researcher” whose study defies common sense; this one’s no different.

Not really sure why this would even be a question? Do people really believe that trail running would somehow be magically different?

Malmo goes home devastated !

Psychologists, physiologists and sport medicine medical doctors seem to be taken seriously with these extremely small sample studies. Economists, sociologists and Big Pharma tend to have sample sizes greater than 100,000. I cannot take a study seriously with a dozen or two dozen individuals.

RunnerSam wrote:

Hasn't malmo been saying this for like 20 years?

*Scoff*

Try 30.

Base size 15. 12 ladies.

Welp that's representative and generalizable.

Wtf.

If the trail surfaces are uneven, rutted, soft in some places, with hard stones or roots in others, that can affect whether they lead to injuries, but in general, even trail surfaces reduce pounding and injuries. It is easy to feel the difference, regardless of whether they were able to measure that difference, especially when you have heel pain. For much of this year it was excruciating to run on concrete, asphalt a bit better, dirt much better, and cut grass far better. My ability to recover from the heel pain was based not only on heel drops and walking, especially barefoot, on the front of my feet (backwards helps more than forwards), but on reducing pounding by moving to grass or dirt wherever possible in a mostly concrete route. When they haven't measured it but there is a noticeable difference recognized by most runners, believe the runners.

Doesn't this make sense though, based on similar studies with max cushion and minimal shoes. Your body adapts, and the forces are generally the same.

But, as already mentioned, small sample size and it is just 1 study. Not enough to make any definitive statements.

rojo wrote:

The study, published in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, had 15 recreational runners (12 females and three males) run over dirt, gravel and paved surfaces in a trail environment with accelerometers attached to their shins and heads. The researchers then compared the differences between the movements and shock attenuation of the runners’ tibias (the larger of the two shin bones) as they ran on the different surfaces.

I run trails mainly because they take you to nicer places in general, and out of traffic. If I'm on a paved path, I stay on the asphalt rather than the adjacent dirt because it's good to run on both firmer and softer surfaces. Stress isn't a bad thing. Lack of impact is why cyclists who don't run are more likely to have poor bone density.

Without reading the link or the study, it seems that accelerometers on shins and heads would only measure differences in stress from the shin up. I still think that softer surfaces and softer shoes reduce impact stress on the feet. That's why people many people who went minimalist 10 years ago got metatarsal stress fractures. Of course the right amount of stress is also good for the feet...

I think all the data from our posts outweigh any single study.

Some don’t get injured regardless of surface and some do better training a high volume on softer surfaces and get hurt or sore running on only roads.

I’m in the latter group.

lol. concrete is good for you. it makes you strong. 

obvious study is obvious

Loading force is only one factor associated with injury. So while trail running might not reduce loading forces associated with running-related injuries, it's quite a jump to suggest that means trail running won't reduce frequency of injuries. There are too many other factors in play.

You don't necessarily need a ton of data points for this kind of study. If there was a big difference between the surfaces, you'd see it (just like you don't need 100,000 miles of data to prove that biking uphill is harder).

That said, I think this sort of weak because they're looking at force markers and not injury rates, which would obviously be more directly useful.

They contribute to different injuries.

Hard surfaces might allow more consistent form.

Hard impact probably affects joints more than soft surfaces. Obviously, the overall force to move is about the same for relatively stable footing. No idea why you would need a study for this