The Potential Relationship Between Leg Bone Length and Running Performance in Well‐Trained Endurance Runners

Abstract

The present study aimed to determine the relationship between leg bone length and running performance in well-trained endurance runners. The lengths of the leg bones in 42 male endurance runners (age: 20.0 ± 1.0 years, body height: 169.6 ± 5.6 cm, body mass: 56.4 ± 5.1 kg, personal best 5000-m race time: 14 min 59 s ± 28 s) were measured using magnetic resonance imaging. The lengths of the femur and tibia were calculated to assess the upper and lower leg lengths, respectively. The total length of the femur + tibia was calculated to assess the overall leg bone length. These lengths of the leg bones were normalized with body height, which was measured using a stadiometer to minimize differences in body size among participants. The relative tibial length was significantly correlated with personal best 5000-m race time (r = -0.328, p = 0.034). Moreover, a trend towards significance was observed in the relative femoral length (r = -0.301, p = 0.053). Furthermore, the relative total lengths of the femur + tibia were significantly correlated with personal best 5000-m race time (r = -0.353, p < 0.05). These findings suggest that although the relationship between the leg bone length and personal best 5000-m race time was relatively minor, the leg bone length, especially of the tibia, may be a potential morphological factor for achieving superior running performance in well-trained endurance runners.

Relationship between leg bone length and sprint performance in sprinters; Are there any event-related differences in 100-m and 400-m sprints?

“…We previously reported that MRI-measured leg bone length correlated with running performance in endurance runners [14]. By contrast, in the present study, we found that absolute and relative leg lengths of the femur and tibia did not correlate with sprint performance in both 100-m and 400-m sprinters.…”

“…The intraclass correlation coefficient for the two measurements in all subjects was 1.000 (95% CI, 0.999-1.000) for the femoral length and 0.999 (95% CI, 0.999-1.000) for the tibial length. Moreover, our previous study has reported high reproducibility of the leg bone length measurements on 2 separate days [14]. Furthermore, in the present study, we examined the relationship between the lengths of the tibia and fibula to ensure the validity of the tibial length as the lower leg length.…”

“…Representative images for calculating the leg bone lengths on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are shown in Figure 1. The MRI measurement has been previously described [14]. The lengths of the femur and tibia were calculated from coronal images for the leg, respectively.…”

“…Of those, the leg length is a major morphological factor regulating step length [9,10]; therefore, longer leg may be related to better sprint performance due to increase in step length during sprinting [11]. We and others previously found a positive relationship between leg length and running performance in endurance runners [12][13][14]. However, the effect of leg length on sprint performance in sprinters is still poorly understood.…”

“…Nevertheless, this technique may have a technical limitation due to the ambiguity in measuring the leg length. Compared to the anthropometrical measurement, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is more appropriate for morphological measurements [1-7, 14, 22], including bone length measurements [4,5,14,22]. To determine our hypothesis with high precision, we used MRI to examine the relationship between leg bone length and sprint performance in both 100-m and 400-m specialized sprinters.…”