How are you moving?

Have you ever wondered how we interact with this world? How are we able to execute our day to day tasks, take that yoga class, walk up the stairs, grab coffee with our friends, sit, dance, or run? Movement is an incredible thing. Human movement has many known patterns that can be seen and studied. Being aware of movement is critical to the fitness journey.

Let’s break down human movement to the fundamental patterns. In total there are 7 to 8 depending on the movement expert you ask.

• Gait
• Locomotion
• Hinge
• Squat
• Lunge
• Push
• Pull
• Rotate

These patterns are key for us to live a healthy and mobile life. At the end of the day we are meant to be mobile beings. Our ancestors spent hours in a day being nomadic beings and traveling just above 30 kilometres a day. We need to break out of the modern prison; the chair.

The first pattern

The first pattern is gait (basically walking). It’s how our ancestors roamed across the world scavenging for food.  Gait is super duper important. Gait has a bipedal nature of using two legs, keeping an upright posture, eyes into the horizon, and back of the foot landing one by one consecutively onto the ground. Sounds pretty simple so far, right?

This is probably the most commonly used movement pattern. Here is the worst part. Imagine if we have a dysfunction or abnormality in the parts we use to walk. Now try to consider how many steps you take; on average a person takes about 1,000 to 3,000 steps a day.

Each step is our personal text message to the world. Now with each step, the world talks back. If we have a dysfunction in our knee, ankle, or hip joint the response of the world is completely skewed. Imagine having to respond to 500 – 5,000 skewed return messages. It becomes the longest game of broken telephone.  We need to fix that. The way we walk can have a direct relationship on our overall health. If we allow it to drag on, we can have more problems when we get older. It is key to address this immediately so that we can live a pain-free and sexy life.

Let’s talk about gait

A proper gait is very important. Start with the checklist below.

• Do you have a collapsed arch or a high arch?
• Do your knees trail inside of your toes?
• Do you have knees that look like you just hopped off a horse (imagine a cowboy)?
• Do you walk with a slumped neck forward?
• Does your hip drop when you take a step forward?
• Any pain?
• Do you limp?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, it may be time to ask a movement professional to assess your gait and teach you how to walk.

That walk in the park may not be a piece of cake, eh?

Stay mobile my friends.