WHAT IS A GAIT ANALYSIS??????
WHAT IS A GAIT ANALYSIS
I'm writing this due to coming across more and more clinics and retailers throughout the UK offering 'Gait Analysis' in the form of someone watching or recording you walking or running and evaluating your feet or your shoes and then suggesting a pair of shoes or orthodics that are more stable, or more neutral, or more cushioned, or are the type that "forces" you to land mid-foot and then your bio-mechanical problems are solved. This is what most people know and have come to accept as gait analysis.
When carrying out a gait analysis, your feet are only one small piece of your bio-mechanical puzzle. What happens to your feet is merely part of a holistic, whole body, integrated movement pattern. Walking or Running, like most other whole-body activities (such as swimming or many outdoor sports), is essentially a unique way of moving.
When a person is analysed statically, dynamically, and then walking or running on the treadmill during a gait analysis, it serves to provide a unique, personal movement pattern, which reveals the programming of everything happening within your body—from kinetic awareness and habit, to individual levels of mobility, stability, flexibility, and functional strength. The analysis of all these different elements taken together is what creates a complete picture of a person's gait. In essence, it is far more than just gait analysis. It is true "movement" analysis.
Gait Analysis uncovers precisely how your body compensates which leads to imbalance around the joints. The larger prime movers (hamstrings, glutes, quads, etc.) become less active, and end up contributing less than their fair share of the work in moving us around. The smaller/tiny stabilising muscles are forced to step in and do the work of the larger, more powerful prime movers. The stabilisers are taxed day in and day out, mile after mile. Over time they end up, in a word, fried. Shredded. The wear and tear on the stabilisers greatly compromises recovery and your ability to train, run or even walk consistently. In short, this scenario is an injury waiting to happen.
Any Gait Analysis must include Trunk, Hips & knees - flexion extension and lateral flexion analysis, load analysis, step length, contact time, centre of gravity, pronation, supination, dorsal and plantar flexion analysis. Only then can you really find out what your Gait Analysis results truly reveal.
Once this is complete do not leave it there, you must then start Gait training and over a period of time, depending on your circumstances you will improve.
There is only one piece of equipment that can do all this and if you haven't already take a look at the groundbreaking Walker View in the link below: