School of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada; Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Curr Biol. 2022 May 23;32(10):2309-2315.e3. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.03.076. Epub 2022 Apr 28.
Human runners have long been thought to have the ability to consume a near-constant amount of energy per distance traveled, regardless of speed, allowing speed to be adapted to particular task demands with minimal energetic consequence. However, recent and more precise laboratory measures indicate that humans may in fact have an energy-optimal running speed. Here, we characterize runners' speeds in a free-living environment and determine if preferred speed is consistent with task- or energy-dependent objectives. We analyzed a large-scale dataset of free-living runners, which was collected via a commercial fitness tracking device, and found that individual runners preferred a particular speed that did not change across commonly run distances. We compared the data from lab experiments that measured participants' energy-optimal running speeds with the free-living preferred speeds of age- and gender-matched runners in our dataset and found the speeds to be indistinguishable. Human runners prefer a particular running speed that is independent of task distance and is consistent with the objective of minimizing energy expenditure. Our findings offer an insight into the biological objectives that shape human running preferences in the real world-an important consideration when examining human ecology or creating training strategies to improve performance and prevent injury.
人类跑步者长期以来被认为具有在不考虑速度的情况下，每跑一定距离消耗近乎恒定能量的能力，从而使速度能够适应特定任务的需求，而不会产生过多的能量后果。然而，最近更精确的实验室测量表明，人类实际上可能具有最佳能量消耗的跑步速度。在这里，我们在自由生活环境中描述跑步者的速度，并确定首选速度是否与任务或能量相关的目标一致。我们分析了一个通过商业健身追踪设备收集的大规模自由生活跑步者数据集，并发现个体跑步者偏爱一种在常见跑步距离内不会改变的特定速度。我们将实验室实验中测量参与者最佳能量消耗跑步速度的数据与我们数据集中年龄和性别匹配的自由生活跑步者的首选速度进行了比较，发现这些速度没有区别。人类跑步者偏爱一种特定的跑步速度，这种速度与任务距离无关，并且与最小化能量消耗的目标一致。我们的研究结果为塑造人类在现实世界中跑步偏好的生物目标提供了深入的了解——在研究人类生态学或制定提高表现和预防受伤的训练策略时，这是一个重要的考虑因素。
