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Learning to walk: A graduate course.

Article Excerpt
Learning to walk: A graduate course

Although you might have mastered the fundamentals decades ago, a little retraining can correct some harmful habits.

Walking comes so naturally to us that it is regularly prescribed without a second thought. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services exercise guidelines published in October 2008 advise all adults, regardless of age and health status, to strive to walk vigorously for a total of at least two and a half hours a week. Yet nowhere do the guidelines suggest how to walk.

Nor would we expect them to. For healthy adults, walking is so automatic that it's impossible to remember having learned how to do it. Yet it's likely that as we've logged pedestrian miles, many of us have picked up a few bad habits along the way that are making our walks less efficient * and maybe even injurious.

The good news is that decades of research have shown that even patterns established over a lifetime can be reversed.

Footwork forensics

Although Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks may be better known than any of its real-life counterparts, scores of institutions around the world are investigating the human gait. At one such institution, the Helen Hayes Hospital in West Haverstraw, N.Y., physiologists have developed a system of gait evaluation by tracking the position of specific points on the head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, thighs, shins, ankles, toes, and heels as people walk. Physiologists have used the "Helen Hayes markers" to determine the elements that make one's walk less than ideal. Rehabilitation therapists have employed that system and other tools and devices to evaluate and retrain people to walk after illness or injury. Similar...

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