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