Peak vertical ground force of hand-knee crawling in human adults.
Arito Yozu, Tetsuya Hasegawa, Naomichi Ogihara and 1 others
PMID 37020828WHAT IT FOUND
When healthy adults crawled on hands and knees, their knees bore significantly more load than their hands.
This mirrors how humans evolved to free their forelimbs for walking, but the study did not test patients or fall risk.
Key findings
01Peak vertical ground force was significantly higher at the knees than at the hands during hand-knee crawling.
02The ratio of hand force to knee force was 0.536, indicating hindlimb dominance similar to other primates.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study included only six healthy adults, all male, so the findings may not apply to women, children, older adults, or people with disabilities. Participants wore kneepads, which may have altered their movement or comfort compared to bare-knee crawling. The study measured healthy individuals performing a designed task, not patients with gait instability or fall risk. The authors acknowledge that the link to clinical fall risk is a hypothesis for future work, not a finding of this study.
Declared interests
The work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI and the Mohammed bin Salman Center for Future Science and Technology for Saudi-Japan Vision 2030. The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the higher knee load as evidence that hand-knee crawling is a safe or effective exercise for fall prevention in patients. This study measured healthy adults in a lab setting and did not test clinical populations or outcomes.