Wide Hips Don’t Slow Runners

It’s not true, as is often said, that people (yes, women) with wide hips make lousy runners. Now comes a researcher at Boston University whose research suggests that wide-hipsters can run just as well as narrow-hipsters. A BU Research story reports that scientists at the school recruited 38 undergraduate men and women, and had them walk and run on a treadmill while gauging how hard they were working by measuring their oxygen consumption. The runners’ motion was tracked by eight cameras trained on infrared markers attached to the participants’ hips, knees, ankles, thighs, and shanks, and the researchers estimated the subjects’ hip width using the results from the infrared trackers. The researchers expected to find that people with wider hips run and walk less efficiently than those with narrow ones, but that wasn’t what they found. In fact, they found no connection at all between hip width and efficiency: wide-hipped runners moved just as well as their narrow-hipped peers.