The objective of this work is the development of a new methodology for characterising the impact behaviour of polymeric foams. At the beginning the foams were tested with a commonly used method to be able to compare with the new achieved impact data. For this purpose the foams were tested under a monotonic uniaxial compression load, where the dependency of force and displacement was measured and transposed to stress-strain data. The new method is based on an impact test with a free motion steel plate that hits the specimen, which is mounted on the floor. To comply with the assumption of a uniaxial load case, the specimen has to have a cubical or cylindrical shape. These tests differ from the monotonic compression tests on one hand in the loading rate and on the other in the kind of measurement. The measurement only consists of an acceleration sensor on the impacting body. With the assumption of an uniaxial impact load and a zero Poisonsratio one can calculate the function of stress, strain and strainrate as well as the hysteretic behaviour of the foam. The quality of this data can be instantly checked by simulating these tests with the same calculated material parameters und comparing the simulation results with the real tests. To show that these material parameters achieved from uniaxial impact tests are also applicable to more complex load situations, test with a spherical impact body were made and compared to the simulation results.