If a muscle is weak, you strengthen it, and the risk of injury goes down. That logic is clean, intuitive, and honestly pretty satisfying. It also fits with much of the recent attention on foot strength among runners. But do runners who get injured actually have weaker feet to begin with?
A new study suggests the answer may be no, or at least not in the simple way many people assume.1Abran, G., Aguilaniu, A., Dardenne, N., Bornheim, S., Delvaux, F., Croisier, J.-L., & Schwartz, C. (2026). Foot and Ankle Characteristics in 225 Runners With and Without a History of Running-Related Injury: A Case-Control Study. Journal of Sport Rehabilitation, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsr.2025-0384
The researchers looked at 225 runners, all of whom completed a questionnaire about their running-related injuries over the previous year. The researchers compared runners with and without a history of injury. They assessed foot morphology and the maximal strength of the ankle plantar flexors, hallux flexors, and lesser toe flexors (muscles in the feet and ankles). They also looked at footstrike pattern and cadence during a self-paced treadmill run.
Runners with and without a history of overuse running injury did not differ in foot-ankle muscle strength. That was true for injury history in general, and it was also true when the researchers examined foot injuries specifically. In other words, the runners who had been injured did not show obviously weaker toe or foot muscles than those who hadn’t been injured.
Faster runners were 51% more likely to report a history of overuse foot injury. That is not especially shocking when you think about it. Faster runners often train harder, race more, and put more overall stress through the foot and ankle. Higher performance can come with higher mechanical cost.
Runners with a history of tibia injury were less experienced and had lower cadence, fitting with the idea that newer runners may be less adapted to repetitive loading, and that cadence may matter more for some injury patterns than isolated foot strength does.
What this means for runners
Foot exercises may still be worth doing, especially since prior intervention studies suggest they can help, but this study suggests that weak foot muscles alone are probably not the primary factor distinguishing injured from uninjured runners. I think the more practical signal here is that injury risk likely sits in the interaction between training load, experience, mechanics, and tissue capacity. Faster runners may experience greater foot stress, and less-experienced runners with lower cadence may be more vulnerable to tibial issues. So rather than treating toe strength as the whole answer, I’d view it as one small piece of a much larger injury-prevention puzzle.
