How’s your gait?

I think mine’s not so great. In high school, friends told me I walked like a duck. I suppose I still do. According to the authorities, by the age of seven you have already developed your unique life-long walking style. Sometimes, if I’m feeling stiff or if my hips or legs hurt, I catch myself walking more like a penguin, listing from side to side. I hate that!

I think that walking correctly is important for your overall structural health. In her book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back, Esther Gokhale, the posture lady, provides detailed instructions on how to walk properly. She garnered this information by studying how people walk in non-industrialized cultures (picture the women walking long distances with bundles on their heads).

Gokhale learning to walk.

Gokhale calls the proper walking style “glidewalking,” as opposed to walking with a heavy tread that jams the hip joint, as well as every other weight-bearing joint. The problem is, the instructions in the book are too complicated and consist of 11 different steps: put foot here, move this, shift that, relax this, tighten that…you become sort of paralyzed. Recognizing that problem, Gokhale says to learn the samba to get a feel for it.

For me, the simplest way to approach glidewalking is to think about just two things: 1) swinging one leg forward (relaxed at the hip) and 2) contracting your butt muscle (gluteus medius) on the other side to propel you forward. “Walking,” Gokhale writes, “is a series of forward propulsions, not falls.” As the gluteus muscle at your back leg contracts to move you forward, your foot on that side remains on the ground for a bit, an action that stretches the psoas muscle that runs from the front of the lumbar spine to the upper inside of the thigh bone—a good thing to do. On the forward foot, your heel lands first, but only barely before the rest of the foot. Walk on a line, with the inner edge of each heel touching the line, and the front of the foot angled slightly outward. Also, keep the pelvis stationary.

OK. It’s not that easy, but worth the effort if you want to avoid the penguin walk.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.