The Dumpling Walk !

Its time for Gait Guys Gait Gaffs again ! 

This is one of our all time favorite gait styles. Aside from the atonic arm swing, what we love about this one is the vertical nature of this gait style.  If you look around you will see this one often. These are the bouncy folks.  There is a bucket load of vertical body movement when in fact the head should stay static in gait and in running.

This gait style is caused by a premature heel rise from premature engagement of the gastrosoleus (and sometimes even the long toe flexors, you will see them hammering and curled). The person will never get to full late-midstance of gait and thus never achieve full hip extension nor adequate ankle dorsiflexion / ankle rocker. These are timely events and specific things are supposed to happen during these phases of gait that are omitted and thus passed into other areas for compensation. This gait style is very inefficient in that the gluteals cannot power into hip extension into a forward progression drive, because the calf is prematurely generating vertical movement through ankle plantarflexion.  This strategy is sometimes deployed because the person actually is significantly ankle dorsiflexion (ankle rocker) deficient.  Meaning, they hit the limitations of dorisflexion and in order to progress forward they first have to go vertical. Obviously, the remedy is to find the functional deficit, remove it and retrain the pattern.  We will be going over this pattern quite a bit in our new DVD line when we can get to it, because there are other deficits that could drive this one such as short hip flexors and quads to name one. 

See you again on Gait Guys Gait Gaffs !…….Shawn and Ivo, we are…….The Gait Guys