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In terms of gait retraining cues, there’s one that’s probably the daddy. The boss. The big cheese. It’s increasing step rate by running to the beat of a metronome. Take a look at this slide from Running Repairs.
It’s from Lenhart et al. (2014) and it shows peak forces during running. The far right column is what happens to those forces when we increase step rate by 10%. The load on quads, glutes med and soleus reduces as does the stress on the patella tendon. Other research highlights how step rate increases can also reduce stress on the patellofemoral joint, hip, tibia, Achilles tendon and more.
There’s one downside though. Have you ever run to the beat of a metronome? It’s so boring! Surely there must be a better way? Well, an alternative that has been suggested is to run to the beat of music. Replace the metronome with Metallica and away you go! Our video below explores new research (Brake et al. 2022) in this to see if it can actually increase step rate plus how you’d go about doing this in clinic.
We discuss gait retraining options for tendinopathy in our ‘Tricky Tendons’ video series. Access it now at clinicaledge.co/tendons
