Contribution of plantar pressure to the prevention and quantification of the muscle-skeletal injury risk in hiking trails--a pilot study.

Hiking trails have been growing in popularity in the health and well-being promotion. Consequently, the foot became an object of study in order to understand the discomfort and pain in the lower limb. The aims of the work were: 1) to detect tendencies for behaviour of maximum values of plantar pressure (MaxP) during the walk on different slopes, 2) to contribute to the methodology of the difficulty level of hiking trails. Equations show strong tendencies (R2 > 0.8) of behaviour of MaxP in the lateral zones of the heel, 4th and 5th metatarsus as well as in the plantar zone of the hallux. The analysis of the difficulty level of the hiking trails branches deserves a separate presentation, including the technical difficulty analysis (with a compulsory emphasis on the biomechanics) and information on the caloric consumption and on the slopes of each branch.