Movement Technique During Jump-Landing Differs Between Sex Among Athletic Playing Surfaces.

Landing technique is often used as a proxy for lower extremity injury risk, but whether the surface an athlete lands on changes that technique is less clear. This small crossover study had 38 recreationally active men and women perform jump-landing tests on four common athletic surfaces, hardwood, artificial pellet turf, grass, and artificial turf, comparing them against concrete, and scored their landing form using a standardized movement checklist. The result was not a simple story of one surface being safer overall. Men scored worse (indicating riskier landing technique) on hardwood and artificial pellet turf compared with women, while women scored better on grass and artificial turf compared with concrete.

This suggests that both surface type and sex jointly shape landing mechanics, which complicates the idea that a single landing-technique score applies the same way to everyone. The main limitation is that this was a small, single-session lab study of jump-landings, not an injury outcome study, so it cannot say whether these technique differences translate into actual injury risk.

If you play sports on different surfaces, from hardwood courts to artificial turf fields, you might wonder whether the surface itself changes how safely you land after a jump. This study looked at that question with a small group of 38 recreationally active men and women, who each performed jump-landing tests on four common athletic surfaces so researchers could score their landing form. What they found was that landing technique differed depending on both the surface and the person's sex.

Men showed worse landing scores on hardwood and artificial pellet turf compared with women, while women showed better landing scores on grass and artificial turf compared with concrete. This doesn't mean one surface is universally safer for everyone, it means the surface-sex combination seems to matter. It's important to know this was a small study looking only at movement technique during a single testing session, not at whether people actually got injured.

So while it raises interesting questions about how surfaces and sex interact, it can't tell us whether these differences lead to more or fewer injuries in real life.

This is a summary of research, not medical advice. Talk to your own healthcare provider about anything affecting your care.

This paper speaks to an assessment question many physiotherapists face: how much can a landing-technique score, like the Landing Error Scoring System (LESS), be generalized across different training and competition surfaces. The study tested 38 recreationally active men and women on four common athletic surfaces (hardwood, artificial pellet turf, grass, artificial turf) in a quasi-randomized crossover design, with vertical jump height, perceptual fatigue, and muscle soreness confirmed similar across sessions. The decisive finding is a sex-by-surface interaction rather than a single main effect.

Men achieved statistically significantly higher (worse) LESS scores than women on hardwood and artificial pellet turf, while women showed statistically significantly lower (better) LESS scores on grass and artificial turf compared with concrete. This challenges the assumption that a LESS score obtained on one surface reflects the same injury-risk profile on another, or that men and women should be interpreted against the same normative benchmark regardless of surface. The contribution here is to movement-technique assessment methodology, not to injury outcome evidence.

This was a laboratory-based, single-session comparison of landing biomechanics, not a clinical trial tracking actual injuries, so the findings cannot establish that surface-related technique differences translate into differing injury incidence. The sample is also small, limiting how confidently these interaction effects generalize across broader athletic populations.