What your dog actually does to your arm: leash force, measured
Published by Planète Pets · managing editor: Clément Lacaille · how our guides are written
Everything written about leashes is written from the dog's point of view: which harness, which length, which material, how to teach loose-leash walking. Almost nothing is written from the point of view of the person holding the other end. A biomechanics team asked exactly that question, force sensor in hand, and the answer shifts the topic from training to walker safety. Our gear guidance is gathered in the dog travel and safety section.
A study that instrumented real walks
Peebles, Bennett, Morrison, Ramirez-Reyes, Chen and Thompson published an assessment in 2026, in Annals of Biomedical Engineering, of dog-leash pulling force and its impact on human gait (see the study). Twenty people did their usual walk, at home, with their dog, then the same route without it. Two numbers stand out.
- Half the participants experienced tensions of at least 125 newtons — roughly the equivalent of 12.7 kg hanging off the arm — during a perfectly ordinary walk.
- The highest peak across the whole sample reached 412.5 newtons, with a loading rate of 2,868.7 newtons per second — and it happened during a standing phase, not while walking.
Walking with the dog also increased stride-time variability and reduced the regularity of trunk oscillations, with no change in exercise intensity. In other words: walking your dog isn't a more athletic walk, it's a less steady one.
Why it matters, with numbers
Pirruccio, Yoon and Ahn documented in 2019, in JAMA Surgery, fractures linked to walking leashed dogs among Americans aged 65 and over (see the study): roughly 32,600 emergency department cases between 2004 and 2017, rising from 1,671 cases in 2004 to 4,396 in 2017. Women accounted for 78 % of the injured, hip fractures for 17 % of cases, and close to half of all injuries involved the upper limb — wrist, humerus, finger, shoulder.
Four practical consequences
- Never wrap the leash around your wrist or fingers. At nearly 2,900 newtons per second, the hand has no time to let go. Hold the handle, and let any slack simply rest in the palm.
- Watch out for the stops, not the straight lines. The single most violent event in the study happened while standing still, when the walker is least braced: a sniff stop, a passing dog, a bolting cat. Shorten the available length at those moments.
- Don't stack up tasks. Since stride regularity is already degraded, avoid the phone in hand and a heavy bag on the leash side, and favour flat surfaces when balance is fragile.
- Treat loose-leash walking as a safety measure for yourself, not just a comfort. Our guidance on the no-pull front-clip harness and on retractable versus standard leashes takes on a different weight in this light.
Frequently asked questions
Do dogs really pull at 412 newtons?
No: that is the single hardest event across the whole sample, not a typical value. The honest benchmark is "half of walkers take at least 125 newtons".
Does the study point to one type of gear being safer?
No, and that is its main limitation: it compares neither leash types, nor harnesses, nor dog sizes, and covers only twenty people. It measures what the human receives, not what protects them best.
Should people over 65 give up walking a dog?
Certainly not: the US study has no denominator — we don't know how many people walk dogs — and the rise it shows also reflects growing dog ownership and more physically active seniors. Find all our guides on the dog hub.
This guide is part of Planète Pets’s Dogs universe. Our advice is general in nature: for any health concern, your veterinarian remains the only reference.