Amongst the obvious, the obscure does lurk

There are times when convention must be breached. Be it to introduce a new theory or experimental method, or – and this may be less obvious – when contriving to write a magazine article.

Ordinarily the natural structure of a light-hearted column such as this would dictate that a little something is saved for the final sentence. A final twist in the tale perhaps – a caustic quip aimed at scoring high on the ‘knowing smile’ scale. No such slavery to convention here however, for we feel that any form of summation of this month’s entry would be slightly disappointing.

So, we thought, no point delaying the inevitable, let’s get it out of the way now. So here it is, the concluding sentence you might have had – coming at you from about 30 seconds in the future, like an episode of Dr Who: “Running barefoot is painful and jumping out of aeroplanes is scary.”

As you can see, not a twist in sight. Obvious you might say; banal even. You will have guessed that the pieces of research in question concern running and skydiving. Being both lazy and risk averse, we on the Science Lite desk are very much out of our comfort zone here – but bear with us as we try and work towards that final sentence.

A study in the excellently titled Gait & Posture journal finds that the trend for barefoot running (…oh yes dear reader, such a trend does exist) is more likely to lead to injuries in some runners. Sports scientists at the National Taiwan Normal University (…oh yes dear reader, such an establishment does exist) got 12 runners doing what they do best on a treadmill – both shod and barefoot – and found that the nuances for both styles of running could explain a glut of barefoot injuries.

It was known that runners can adopt either a heel-first or forefoot-first landing and it turns out that runners who are used to wearing shoes may be more susceptible to injuries when they run barefoot if they carry on running with the heel hitting the ground first. This can add extra strain on muscles and lead to injury. So, not as obvious a conclusion as it first seemed – nothing to do, as we had lazily assumed, with stubbing toes or running through broken glass.

And so to sky diving. A few years ago a team from Northampton University interested in stress responses were concerned that laboratory based paradigms of stressful situations were unrepresentative – so they decided to sample people who make stressful situations their stock-in-trade. Skydivers.

Previous laboratory studies have observed that when an individual is repeatedly exposed to a stressful situation, such as public speaking, their physiological responses – levels of arousal and stress hormones – decrease as they become accustomed to it. However, publishing online in Physiology & Behavior, the team were the first to observe that skydiving increases levels of cortisol which remains the same even with repeated exposure to jumping.

Ok, to sum up – and you’ll recognise this – running barefoot is painful and jumping out of aeroplanes is scary. But is this really the end of the story? The final twist is there – amongst the obvious, the obscure does lurk. Barefoot running can cause injury, not because of increased risk of lesions, or broken bones but because of something much more fundamental about our natural gait. Sky diving is stressful, but the interesting thing is that it is equally so every time.

Both studies reveal interesting insights into the science of the human machine, and highlight that beneath every apparently obvious conclusion lay a deeper scientific truth. And scientific truths are always, always, worth finding out.