Study of human running for various shoes

Abstract

Mechanical energy consumption during human running on various shoes were studied. The subject was modeled by an eleven segment planar open linkage system and analyzed by Newtonian equations of motion from film data with a sampling rate of 50Hz. The motion data from films were smoothed by lower 7 harmonics before analysis. Five different kinds of shoes were tried for a normal male subject running on a concrete floor. The mechanical energy consumption in each case was evaluated from the five different criteria suggested by others and a joint energy consumption criterion newly devised based on the muscle contractions. The jogging shoe gave the lowest energy consumptions for most of the criteria employed.