ABSTRACT
Landing after jumping is common in daily human activities. Jumping is an activity during which muscle contraction energy is used to elevate the body’s gravitational potential energy. Strenuous take-off muscles will add high gravitational potential energy into the body, hence landing muscles must control joints to effectively dissipate the large load to ensure a safe landing. In certain sports, such as gymnastics, GRF reaches as much as 18 times body weight (BW) on single leg landing (Panzer, 1987). Nigg & Bobbert (1990) noted that it is difficult to demonstrate a causal relationship between load and injury. However, numerous studies have reported high incidence of injuries to the lower extremities in athletes who participated in sports involving frequent jumping and landing activities (Ford et al., 2003; McKay et al., 2001; Olsen et al., 2004). McKay et al. (2001), for example, reported that the rate of ankle injury was 3.85 per 1000 participations with the most common mechanism being landing (45%).
