Running with a pram or stroller might make parents less susceptible to ankle pain and injuries to their calf muscles, foot arches and Achilles tendons. A survey of parents suggests there is a 37 per cent drop in injury risk with pram use. This may be partly due to changes in vertical forces – how much force our legs absorb with each step – when pushing a child.
“You get a little bit of a walker effect where you’re leaning and putting some weight on the stroller,” says Allison Altman Singles at Pennsylvania State University, who ran with a pram after the births of her two children. “That led me to wonder, you know, is this actually protective?”
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Previous research suggests that people running with a pram tend to have shorter strides and slower speeds. They also lean forward more, with greater hip flexion and forward pelvic tilt. Last year, Altman Singles and her colleagues found there is a 16 per cent lower vertical impact force when running with a pram, but whether this affects injury risk was unclear.
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To learn more, Altman Singles and her team analysed self-reported running and injury data from 196 parents who used any kind of pram on at least some of their runs while their children were younger than 3 years old. These individuals were compared against another 53 mothers or fathers who ran when their children were the same age, but without prams. All the participants had some running experience before becoming parents.
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The two groups of parents covered similar total distances and were relatively well matched in terms of factors like age, height and weight. But there were many more women than men in both groups, particularly the pram one.
Overall, 30 per cent of the non-pram runners reported having had running-related injuries, compared with 19 per cent of the pram runners. These included a higher incidence of ankle pain, calf muscle injury, plantar fasciitis (heel pain that occurs when the thick band of tissue on the bottom of the foot becomes irritated or inflamed) and Achilles tendinitis (injury of the Achilles tendon).
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“Generally, stroller running involves rapid steps with short stride lengths,” says Cara Wall-Scheffler at Seattle Pacific University. “Although this can increase metabolic cost, it can also decrease the force production at each foot strike, which might explain some of these injury reductions.”
Wall-Scheffler says we should see this paper as a “great start” to understanding an important topic. However, future work should include a more balanced mix of men and women, she says. For instance, oestrogen and progesterone may affect the pliability of connective tissue, which could affect a woman’s injury risk.
Future studies should also collect injury-related data more regularly over time and could even investigate the effects of different pram-pushing styles, such as using one or two hands, says Wall-Scheffler.
Journal Reference:PLoS One DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0354371