Health&Wellness Magazine August 2014 | Page 21

For advertising information visit www.samplerpublications.com or call 859.225.4466 | August 2014 How Gait Affects Everything By Charles Sebastian The way we walk and move has a tremendous effect on the quality of our lives. Ask anyone who’s been laid up for a while and they’ll tell you how frustrating it is to have ease of motion taken away. For our wheelchair-bound and bedridden friends, it’s been taken away permanently in many cases, and most of them would tell you they would give anything to have it back. Something as seemingly simple as how the feet interact with the terrain they’re moving over is huge over the span of a lifetime. Some people tend to pronate their feet as they walk (elevating the edge or blade of the foot, with a lot more emphasis in the arch); others tend to supinate, meaning lifting the arch and rolling from the ankle to the edge. In addition, there is the internal rotation from the hip (pigeon-toed) and the external rotation (turning out, if you’re a ballet dancer, duck-footed if you’re in fifth grade). Moving up the leg, we