Anyone who has pushed a stroller while jogging is familiar with the added effort (and hassle) it can involve, even just to get out the door. But a new study suggests running with a stroller may come with an unexpected upside. People who pushed a stroller while running reported fewer overuse injuries than those who did not.
The findings, which were recently reported by the Washington Post, were published last week in the journal PLOS One. Researchers surveyed parents who had continued running after having children, comparing 196 stroller runners with 53 runners who didn’t use one.
Thirty per cent of the non-stroller group reported an overuse injury during the first three years of parenthood, compared with 19 per cent of stroller runners. When the researchers accounted for mileage, the stroller group’s injury rate was 0.19 injuries per 1,000 miles, versus 0.42 in the non-stroller group—a difference of about 55 per cent.
More miles, fewer injuries
And the stroller runners weren’t running less. Between the time their children were six and 12 months old, they logged 34 per cent more mileage than the runners who ran stroller-free.
,Allison Altman-Singles, a professor at Penn State Berks and the study’s leading authorsays the handlebar may change the load on the body. “When you run with a stroller, you unweight the body a little bit,” she said in a news release, explaining that some downward force is redirected through the stroller.
Earlier research on biomechanics suggests that pushing a stroller changes a runner’s gait. A runner’s stride length shortens, and they are forced to lean their torso farther forward, so running with a stroller may not necessarily be kinder on every part of a runner’s body, and more research is warranted.
A fast new stroller-mile record
Stroller running has just had an exciting new moment in the record books. Earlier this month, Ohio runner Stephen Biebelhausen pushed his one-year-old daughter, Blake, through a mile in 4:17 at Cleveland’s Guardian Mile.
Biebelhausen ran 4:17, faster than the current Guinness World Records mark of 4:26.29, set by Silas Frantz in 2025. The performance still needs Guinness verification to become official. “I thought it would be fun to just pop her in there,” Biebelhausen told Cleveland’s News 5. “I looked up the course record. I was like, ‘I could probably do that.’”