Parametric analysis of landing injury : The effect of landing posture and joint displacement

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 [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], 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 [Formula: see text] 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.