Gait analysis, as waste of time?

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  • I don't want to get into a slanging match but there are some people who are too stupid to see beyond the end of their nose. I guess if you walk round with your fingers in your ears going blah blah you can believe anything.

  • The Grinch wrote (see)

    I don't want to get into a slanging match but there are some people who are too stupid to see beyond the end of their nose. I guess if you walk round with your fingers in your ears going blah blah you can believe anything.

    Your argument being?

  • Argument being you don't want to consider the evidence. Makes you pretty useless Ben. Stick your fingers in your ears and go blah blah if you like. You can't persuade people who act plain dumb.

  • ToroToro ✭✭✭

    With that Sweatshop 30 day exchange thing what's the deal?  Life of a shoe? Debatable, I know with surface etc but 400-500 miles is not unreasonably short.  If I run 100-120 mpw can I have free shoes for ever? #justsayin   

  • The Grinch wrote (see)

    Argument being you don't want to consider the evidence. Makes you pretty useless Ben. Stick your fingers in your ears and go blah blah if you like. You can't persuade people who act plain dumb.

    Pray present the evidence then. 

    You might want to prepare to get metaphorically beaten, like you stole something from Sweatshop!

  • All these shops that offer 'gait analysis' are simply looking to see if you overpronate or not. And sure if enough, if you do they put you in shoes to correct it slightly. However, all this is just entertainment, because there is no evidence to suggest that if you overpronate you are more likely to get injured. This whole nonsense was created by the manufacturers and has been passed down to their dealers and in turn the shop assistants. Don't waste your time with it. Just bu what fits well and is comfortable

  • Shoes smell like horse piss wrote (see)

    All these shops that offer 'gait analysis' are simply looking to see if you overpronate or not. And sure if enough, if you do they put you in shoes to correct it slightly. However, all this is just entertainment, because there is no evidence to suggest that if you overpronate you are more likely to get injured. This whole nonsense was created by the manufacturers and has been passed down to their dealers and in turn the shop assistants. Don't waste your time with it. Just bu what fits well and is comfortable

     

    With all due respect, there is a mountain of published evidence that overpronation causes running injuries. 

    This is something that even people who are sceptical about gait analysis usually don’t dispute. 

  • Only decent research I have seen says pronation does NOT cause injuries.

    http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2013/06/12/bjsports-2013-092202.abstract

    The above survey had a sample size of 924.  Not your usual three men and a dog in most running related studies...

    the bmj bit stands for British Medical Journal.

  • Surrey Runner wrote (see)

    Only decent research I have seen says pronation does NOT cause injuries.

    http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2013/06/12/bjsports-2013-092202.abstract

    The above survey had a sample size of 924.  Not your usual three men and a dog in most running related studies...

    the bmj bit stands for British Medical Journal.

    So what objections do you have to the studies that indicate that overpronation does cause running injuries?  You can't simply cherry pick studies that suport one position and ignore the ones that do not. 

    Tweed JL, Campbell JA, Avil SJ (2008). "Biomechanical risk factors in the development of medial tibial stress syndrome in distance runners". J Am Podiatr Med Assoc 98 (6): 436–44

    Hintermann B, Nigg BM (September 1998). "Pronation in runners. Implications for injuries". Sports Med 26 (3): 169–76

    Arendse RE (2004). "A biomechanical basis for the prescription of orthoses in the treatment of common
    running injuries". Med. Hypotheses 62 (1): 119–20

  • But you crooks call it gait analysis. It's nothing of the sort. If I pay for a service for my car I don't expect you to check the tyres. It's just looking at how your foot falls. Come on Watchdog it's time to send to Matt Alright to expose people like Ben. 

  • Have a heart Grinch, I was only a foot soldier for the evil empire. 

    No it is not only looking at how your foot falls.  The foot rolling inwards displaces the shin bone sideways, which in turn effects the knee, and even the lower back. A proper gait analysis looks at displacement of the shin bone, and the angle between the shin and knee. 

  • For what its worth I think Ben is trying to give a view that is well supported, call it foot fall analysis or gait analysis....I think we all know what we are talking about.

    I have had "gait analysis" at 4 different places, the quality at each shop was variable. Recently due to ITB issues I have seen a physio, also qualified in Musculoskeletal. he was very wary of the advice given at shops....my own view is it of course comes down to the individual giving the advice.

     

  • Alright Ben. Maybe you are not quite so bad. If I was running a running shop I would seriously consider "gait analysis" because it sells shoes. But the knowledgeable can see through it and the new runners are totally sold by it. Shop assistants are not podiatrists and should try to pretend to be. A bit of hocus pocus goes down well to the most gullible of newbies. It works, that's why they use it.

  • I think that you have reached a fairly absolute conclusion far too quickly Grinch. 

    This thread started with one question, and it has branched into several. 

    Q. Does gait analysis work?

    A. The published evidence presents a mixed picture. 

    Q. Is pronation a major cause of running injuries. 

    A. Yes, that is pretty much boxed off now. 

    Q. If we assume that gait analysis doesn’t work, are the running shops cynically conning people, or are they genuinely misguided. 

    A. If that were the case, I could tell you with great confidence that they were genuinely misguided. 

    Sully made a good point when he said that a lot depended on the ability of the sales assistant.  When you start out in gait analysis you get a lot of 30 day returns, but you learn from your mistakes and they become rare.  The better shop assistants would have no trouble holding an argument with a podiatrist. 

    If it was merely a sales tactic, then why spend hundreds of pounds training each member of staff.  If you work as a doorstep seller or charity mugger, they get you doing role play in the office, but never pay for you to travel anywhere or study at any university. 

    I cannot say that Sweatshop were particularly fair to me as a member of staff, or that I came away with a high opinion of their organisation and management, but you are making a mistake if you dismiss them as simply using a crude sales trick. 

  • Lets not get into deep philosophical arguments Flob. 

    I think that the burden of proof is on the person claiming they have the answer, while the person saying that they can do no more than constrain it gets a bit more leeway. 

    When I was writing up my Masters thesis, the one thing that my supervisor always beat me up for was cherry picking sources to suit my argument.   He would say “ you have to cite this even if you don’t agree with it”. 

     

  • I would blame most running related injuries on stability or motion control shoes.  Over built shoes with their gimmicky devices do not work. Ignore the marketing and the shoe company lingo  the sales assistants try and trick you into buying the most expensive shoes that will correct slight over pronation or supination. Wake Up people minimalist shoes will help you run better times and run injury free.

    Stability and motion control shoes with their stiff soles and arch supports act as a band aid solution that does not fix the weakness in your feet. Over time relying upon stability and motion control shoes will lead to your feet becoming weaker and dependent upon stability and motion control shoes. It would be a better idea to switch to neutral trainers and gradually look at minimalist/light trainers for your walking and running. Natural foot motion should not be corrected, it should be encouraged: neutral trainers, light trainers and minimalist trainers help promote a foot motion similar to walking/running barefoot.

    I am living proof that stability and motion control shoes do not work. The stability and motion control features over corrected slight pronation and more stress and impact forces were transferred to my knees. Simply removing the stability shoes and donating them to charity and only buying minimalist/light weight and neutral shoes has changed my life and improved my running performances. I ignore the advice of the running shoe sales assistant who try and bombard me with running shoe company marketing lingo.  I have over a dozen pair of running shoes and none of them are stability shoes and they are mainly light weight/minimalist shoes, a few pairs of neutral trainers.

    I will never ever buy stability/motion control shoes ever again they were the bane of injuries I endured in the past. I do not believe in gait analysis, static foot test or wet foot test. Pronation(roll in) and supination(roll out) are natural foot motions and they do not need to be corrected or prevented. There is no scientific or medical evidence to prove that pronation or supination leads to injuries. 

     

  • What Warrior writes about mc shoes being wrong and minimalist being right and the way to go is absolutely correct .... for Warrior.

    But some of us need the added stability from the shoe or from an insert. I certainly do. Without it I can feel my foot going all over the place. When I started running I was soon plagued by knee injuries, which cleared up after a visit to Sweatshop.

    I'm old and ugly enough now to make my own choices but back then I needed some advice and I think I was well advised. Physios have pointed me towards stability as well.

    Horses for courses.

  • Ian MIan M ✭✭✭

      

    Ben Davies 15 wrote (see)

     

    Q. Is pronation a major cause of running injuries. 

    A. Yes, that is pretty much boxed off now. 

     

     It is?

    http://www.runnersworld.com/running-shoes/does-pronation-matter

    Also, if you are going to cite Nigg as an example of someone who says pronantion is a major cause of running injuries, then you might want to look at more recent work by the same author who say there is no link.

    http://www.footscienceinternational.com/images/stories/Research_Papers/niggnewparadigm.pdf

    Oh and if you read the Nigg paper that you quote as evidence for the pronation injury ( rather than cut n pasting from the wikipedia page on pronation) you'll notice it says -

    "The belief that runners who overpronate have an initially higher risk for sustaining a running-related injury is still widely held by runners and coaches, although there has been no reliable study supporting this."

  • RoadWarrior wrote (see)
    I am living proof that stability and motion control shoes do not work.

     

    But, by your measure, I am living proof that stability shoes do work. So.. that's a stalemate!.

    I'm open minded on all this, but your arguments look terribly biased, based on the fact that you, personally, have had a bad experience with stability shoes.  

    So evangelical that, for me, your post detracts from your argument.

  • http://nomahealth.com/evidence-against-prescribing-running-shoes-based-on-the-motion-control-paradigm/

    So what can we conclude from these findings? Motion-control shoes offered little benefit to the runners in the study, and in fact were more likely to cause pain and injury than any of the other shoe types. The fact that every single severe overpronator experienced an injury in her motion control shoes demands further investigation. In the absence of other evidence, why should anybody wear them for preventing a running injury? The authors themselves conclude, “This study is unable to provide sup-port for the convention that highly pronated runners should wear motion control shoes.”

    Second, this study showed that neutral runners did better in stability shoes, and pronated runners did better in neutral shoes. Try to make sense of that finding! This is a complete reversal of what would be expect-ed based on the current pronation-control model. This rather startling result calls into question the manufacturer practice of classifying shoes based on degree of pronation control, and it also raises serious questions about the fitting process employed by many shoe stores—should they re-ally be placing runners in shoes based on their degree of pronation?

  • http://nomahealth.com/evidence-against-prescribing-running-shoes-based-on-the-motion-control-paradigm/

    “Current conventions for assigning stability categories for women’s running shoes do not appear appropriate based on the risk of experiencing pain when training for a half marathon. The findings of this study suggest that our current approach of prescribing in-shoe pronation control systems on the basis of foot type is overly simplistic and potentially injurious.” This doesn’t instill much confidence in the current system, does it? By allowing publication of a study that openly states that there is no clinical data showing that shoes designed to control pronation do anything to prevent injuries, Nike took a great risk.

    It makes one wonder if the whole pronation-control shoe paradigm is nothing more than a giant marketing gimmick whose goal is to scare consumers into buying shoes based on fear of injury. It’s a time-honored marketing tactic—convince consumers of a need, and provide a product that supposedly fulfills it.

    In this case, the need is a neutral gait in order to reduce injury risk, and the products are the shoes that promise to correct gait to meet the need. Furthermore, in the absence of evidence showing that running shoes either do or don’t reduce injury risk (or maybe even increase it), why stop making something that continues to sell and has come to be expected by consumers?

     

  • Ian M wrote (see)

      

    Ben Davies 15 wrote (see)

     

    Q. Is pronation a major cause of running injuries. 

    A. Yes, that is pretty much boxed off now. 

     

     It is?

    http://www.runnersworld.com/running-shoes/does-pronation-matter

    Also, if you are going to cite Nigg as an example of someone who says pronantion is a major cause of running injuries, then you might want to look at more recent work by the same author who say there is no link.

    http://www.footscienceinternational.com/images/stories/Research_Papers/niggnewparadigm.pdf

    Oh and if you read the Nigg paper that you quote as evidence for the pronation injury ( rather than cut n pasting from the wikipedia page on pronation) you'll notice it says -

    "The belief that runners who overpronate have an initially higher risk for sustaining a running-related injury is still widely held by runners and coaches, although there has been no reliable study supporting this."

    Here is the problem Ian

    Even if there is published data that contradicts the idea of pronation causing injuries, you still don’t get to dismiss the published data that says it does, or cherry pick the sources that support your position. 

    That isn’t how science works. 

    If you do that then you are no different than a young earth creationist who starts with a predetermined position and sets out to find the evidence to support it. 

  • 8 million years of evolution. Thank goodness shoe manufacturers came along in the early 70s and saved us from our faulty, malfunctioning feetimage

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