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In general, the knees, ankles and Achilles’ tendons are the sites of most running-related injuries, previous studies have found. And in this experiment, many of the women runners jarred their knees, especially when they landed on their heels. That running form resulted in about 16 percent more force moving through the knee joint than when women landed near their forefeet. The elevated forces were particularly evident along the heel strikers’ kneecaps and the medial or inside portion of their knees, where the joint is known to be particularly vulnerable to overuse injuries. But the forefoot strikers’ legs were not immune from force. They simply absorbed it differently, with almost 20 percent more force moving through their ankles and Achilles’ tendons than among the women who hit with their heels.

The net result of these differences, the researchers found, was that the amount of force moving through a volunteer’s knees over any given distance was equivalent, whether they ran or walked. A runner generated more pounding with each stride, but took fewer strides than a walker, so over the course of, say, a mile, the overall load on the knees was about the same.

Something is always going to go wrong, for you and everybody else, but it can still be your day.

Ordinary running shoes function perfectly well for new runners regardless of how they pronate, according to new research from Aarhus University