Sports medicine & Kinesiology

New model predicts how shoe properties affect a runner's performance

A good shoe can make a huge difference for runners, from career marathoners to couch-to-5K first-timers. But every runner is unique, and a shoe that works for one might trip up another. Outside of trying on a rack of different ...

Sports medicine & Kinesiology

Stroke therapy shoe empowers patients' recovery

In a rural village near Guadalajara, Mexico, Maria Magdalena Valencia Juares, known as Elena, has to climb 120 stairs to get to her home on the top of a hill. It's a source of exercise for the 70-year-old and the connection ...

Health

Yoga may help to prevent frailty in older adults

A systematic review of 33 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) found that yoga improved gait speed and lower extremity strength in inactive older people. However, yoga did not seem to offer a benefit for frailty markers over ...

Sports medicine & Kinesiology

Improving the accuracy of markerless gait analysis

In people with gait disabilities (i.e., a pattern of walking—or gait—that is not normal), assessing gait speed, stride length, and joint kinematics are essential. Measurement of gait parameters over a period of time is ...

page 1 from 8

Gait

Gait is the pattern of movement of the limbs of animals, including humans, during locomotion over a solid substrate. Most animals use a variety of gaits, selecting gait based on speed, terrain, the need to maneuver, and energetic efficiency. Different animal species may use different gaits due to differences in anatomy that prevent use of certain gaits, or simply due to evolved innate preferences as a result of habitat differences. While various gaits are given specific names, the complexity of biological systems and interacting with the environment make these distinctions 'fuzzy' at best. Gaits are typically classified according to footfall patterns, but recent studies often prefer definitions based on mechanics. The term typically does not refer to limb-based propulsion through fluid mediums such as water or air, but rather to propulsion across a solid substrate by generating reactive forces against it (which can apply to walking while underwater as well as on land).

Due to the rapidity of animal movement, simple direct observation is rarely sufficient to give any insight into the pattern of limb movement. In spite of early attempts to classify gaits based on footprints or the sound of footfalls, it wasn't until Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey began taking rapid series of photographs that proper scientific examination of gaits could begin.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA