Engineering: Unique feet

 

US biomechanists have found that longer toes and a unique ankle structure can provide sprinters with a burst of acceleration that puts them ahead of other runners.

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At the start of a sprint the only way a runner can speed up is through the reaction force that results from the action of leg muscles pushing on the ground," said Stephen Piazza, associate professor of kinesiology, Penn State University. "Long toes provide sprinters the advantage of maintaining maximum contact with the ground just a little bit longer than other runners."
 
The team used ultrasound imaging for their study of the muscle architecture of the foot and ankle between sprinters and non-sprinters. They matched 12 sprinters with 12 non-sprinters of the same height and measured the sliding of the Achilles tendon during ankle motion, from which the leverage of the tendon can be calculated.
 
"What we found was that the lever arms (distance between the tendon and centre of rotation of the ankle) were significantly shorter - about 25 per cent shorter - in sprinters," said Piazza, whose findings appeared recently in the Journal of Experimental Biology. "This difference might be explained by a trade-off between leverage and muscle force-generating capacity."
 
The team have developed a computer model to understand the kind of human foot that would produce a similar sprinting advantage. The model could analyse the physiological data they had created earlier.
 
"We wanted to see how much acceleration we could get out of the model when we changed the tendon lever arm and the length of the toes," added Piazza. "What we found is that when the Achilles tendon lever arm is the shortest and the toes are longest, we get the greatest acceleration."

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