Alva's College of Physiotherapy Moodbidri, Dakshina Kannada District, Karnataka
The integrity of foot arch plays a vital role in providing shock absorption in lower limb activities. Barefoot running is presumed to help retraining intrinsic foot muscle and causing a well developed medial arch of foot compared shod runners as reported by researchers and allowing proper stretch and recoiling effect on foot arch, thereby preventing injuries in runners. Thus this study was intended to analyze variation in medial arch height of foot among long, middle distance shod and barefoot runners.
Cross sectional study.
Convenient stratified sampling.
For this purpose, 60 samples were selected. Namely 20 from barefoot runners, 20 from shod runners and 20 from controls in analysing their medial arch height with validated tool named normalized navicular height truncated (NNH) to see if there is real difference exist in arch height static weight bearing posture among these groups.
ANOVA test was used to analyze significance of difference among three groups NNH and resulted in p=0.88 for right foot and p=0.34 on left foot.
The current study revealed no significant difference between these three groups in the evaluation of navicular height normalized.
Normalized navicular height, runners, BMI
