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Parametric analysis of landing injury

The effect of landing posture and joint displacement

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Abstract

During landing, the lower limb joints work concertedly to reduce landing forces. Changing the biomechanics of one joint can alter landing strategies in other joints thus affecting the probability of injury. Therefore, understanding the mutual effects between the joints is crucial for the prevention of lower extremity injuries. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of joint displacement and initial contact posture on the impact forces and joint kinematics during drop landing, via computational modeling. The impact dynamics of drop landing is modeled by a three link planar model. Different landing scenarios are then simulated to investigate how restricting the displacement of one joint and changing its initial contact angle affect the other joints’ ranges of motion, the trunk motion, and the impact forces. Our study suggests that the impact force increases by up to \(68\%\), \(100\%\) and \(42\%\), by restricting the hip, knee and ankle joints, respectively. Restricting each one of the hip and knee joints decreases the displacement of the other one. The association between the ankle displacement and the hip/knee motion depends on joints’ stiffness and landing posture. Moreover, changing the landing posture affects the joints kinematics and impact forces significantly. A safe landing posture is a fore-foot landing with knee flexion angle of around 30° to 40° and a foot-ground angle of 40° to 55°, which decreases the impact force by more than \(75\%\) in comparison to the erect posture with horizontal foot. The obtained results are of practical importance in training landing skills and designing force-reducing external components.

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Data availability

The data analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The MATLAB codes used in the current study can be available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

  1. Considering a different (yet reasonable) value for this horizontal distance would only change the study range of variation for the joint angles, which has no effect on the generality of the parametric study and its main results.

  2. For \(q_{2_0}=0^\circ\) which corresponds to the erect posture, the ankle–hip displacement is achievable only in the range of − 10 to 0 cm, and thus in this case the blue, green, and red curves represent − 10 , − 5, 0 cm displacements instead.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Isfahan University of Technology, 84156-83111, Isfahan, Iran

    Marzieh Mojaddarasil

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, 1417466191, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Jafar Sadigh

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  1. Marzieh Mojaddarasil
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  2. Mohammad Jafar Sadigh
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Correspondence to Marzieh Mojaddarasil.

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Appendix

Appendix

The pseudo-code of the algorithm developed for adjusting the parameters of the foot-ground contact model is as follows.

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Mojaddarasil, M., Sadigh, M.J. Parametric analysis of landing injury. Phys Eng Sci Med 44, 755–772 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13246-021-01023-0

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