The role of footwear on impact forces and soft tissue vibrations during active and passive landings

Abstract

The aim of this study was to explore the effect of basketball shoes on impact forces, soft tissue vibrations, and their possible interactions during active landing (drop jump, DJ) and passive landing (PL). Six male basketball players wore two types of shoes (basketball shoe vs. control shoe) to execute 5 trials of double-leg landing in each of 6 testing conditions from a manual tiltable platform (i.e., 2 landing styles × 3 heights: 30 cm, 45 cm, and 60 cm). Kinematics of the lower extremity, ground reaction force data, and accelerations of the quadriceps femoris were collected simultaneously. The results showed that there was no significant shoe effect on the input signal for both the time domain and the frequency domain during DJ. However, during PL, the amplitude of impact and loading rate in basketball shoe were obviously smaller at each height (p<0.05); meanwhile, input frequency was also significantly lower for the basketball shoe condition than the control at 45 cm height (p<0.05). Furthermore, input frequency would move towards soft tissue vibration frequency and created a resonance situation (below 25 Hz). Findings of this study indicated that under the condition of related muscles were not be activated properly, the basketball shoe reduced the magnitude of impact, changed the input frequency, and kept away from the resonance frequency, which may further be enlightened and developed in performance and fatigue. © 2010 International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering.