Footwear and Cadence Affect Gait Variability in Runners with Patellofemoral Pain

Abstract

Purpose: To examine the effects of increased cadence and minimalist footwear on lower-limb variability in runners with patellofemoral pain (PFP). Methods: Fifteen (12 female, 3 male) runners with PFP ran on an instrumented treadmill with three-dimensional motion capture in three randomly ordered conditions: (i) standard shoe at preferred cadence, (ii) standard shoe +10% cadence, and (iii) minimalist shoe at preferred cadence. Vector coding was used to calculate coordination variability between strides for select lower-limb joint couplings. Approximate entropy was calculated to assess continuous variability for segment kinematic and kinetic data and compared between conditions using repeated-..