Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Run-A-Day podcast. I'm Doug Adams, and we have a great show to kick off the next season. So thanks for you joining us after a little break here. And I've had some time to reflect on running while taking a little break over the summer and realize something about gait. Gait, whether it's running or walking gait, is one of the most functional ways that our body expresses its ability to move. There are few things that people do on a regular basis that expresses movement in the same way. Despite this importance of gait, very few people truly understand gait or look at it close enough to make an impact. So today we're going to dive in a topic that might surprise some of you, the importance of analyzing an athlete's walking gait. I know when we think about athletes we tend to focus on the higher intensity movements like running jumping and spreading but what if I told you that one of the best places to start optimizing performance and preventing injuries is how you walk the theme of the season at run dna podcast is going to be about treating the whole runner whether that's focusing on finer movements like walking or jumping or diving into strength and nutrition combat concepts we really want to focus on all that it takes to get a runner healthy and performing at their best If you have anything that you want to learn about this season or topics you want to discuss or guests you want to have on, please leave a comment or reach out to let us know. We'd love to hear from you about what would be most valuable for you. So now let's dive in today's topic. Walking is something we all do every day, but for athletes, it's more than just a means of getting from point A to point B. Walking is a foundational movement that can tell us a lot about how an athlete moves and whether or not they're a runner, soccer player, and even a swimmer. How you walk reveals a lot of the underlying biomechanical patterns that provides a lot of valuable information that may relate back to their sport. When we analyze an athlete's walking gait, we can easily identify imbalances, asymmetries, or inefficiencies that might not be obvious during some of the more complex movements like running or jumping. And these small issues, even if left unchecked for a short time, can lead to larger problems like overuse injuries, which are all too common in the athletic world. So I searched all over to find an article that links someone's walking mechanics to their running mechanics. And guess what? Couldn't find any article like that. And this is something I get asked a lot too as well. You know, if I change somebody's walking, can I get them to run better or can we help them out? And from a theoretical standpoint, it makes sense that we can't find an article like this. What we know about the human body is that we possess unique motor patterns for the activities that we participate in. So the way we walk relies on one motor pattern. The way we run lies on a different motor pattern. Unless someone found an article that I couldn't, I would not suggest that we should expect that gait retraining for walking could change their running form. So why should we care about walking, especially for athletes? So everyone, I think, needs a walking game analysis. But particularly when we're talking about athletes, we must consider that stress is stress. It's often what an athlete does before they ever step onto the field or the track that contributes to why they do or do not get injured when they participate. We do a lot of work with the military, and a topic of conversation that pretty much always comes up is ruck marching. What we know from peer review literature is that many running injuries occur because someone has multiple risk factors and a cumulative load leading into an activity. Then they participate to a degree that may exceed a structure's load capacity. So when a soldier goes for a run and gets injured, that has a lot to do with how much marching and rucking they've been doing before they ever went on the run. The running was just a straw that broke the camel's back. Put in another analogy for them that comes from some of our certified running aid analyst courses, we're a lot like a car. If our tank is half to empty and we have worn out tires, we're likely to break down much faster than if we are coming into a race at a hundred percent. I've seen time and time again, many people that work with athletes make a critical mistake of not focusing on walking gait. This is especially true in the post-surgical population. The absence of pain and just eyeballing somebody's walking mechanics isn't good enough. What if that patient never recovers full terminal knee extension and is slowly stressing the patellofemoral joint? When they do return to running, jumping, or cutting, their body will already be worn down from the stress of regular walking. The same goes for non-operative. What happens to the person that sprains their ankle? They change their gait, they start returning to play, and they wind up injured. You can give that ankle sprain athlete the best range of motion, strength, and even running form in the world, but if you don't restore that normal walking mechanics, there could be an injury waiting to happen. As I was preparing for this podcast, I was looking around and seeing what other people were saying about it and just the importance of it. And unfortunately, I saw a lot of people saying that running is like a faster version of walking. But that's really not true. There's some big differences between the two. But that doesn't mean that we can't get a lot of great information about an athlete and their running form by looking at the way that they walk. no matter who I'm working with, I want to try to understand their whole story that I can really identify the root cause of their issues. So here's some of the big differences between walking and running. And this is by no means exhaustive. This could be a whole episode itself where we could really dive deep into some of this. But just by definition, the difference between running and walking is that running has a period of float, and walking has periods where both feet are on the ground at the same time. That's basic definition here. When we start to think about what goes into successfully running or successfully walking, we start to see some other differences. And I want to focus on one particular area. Again, this isn't an exhaustive list, but running relies on our elastic properties to be efficient. When we run, we try to have a low time spent on the ground so that we can take advantage of some of those elastic properties because our body is capable of returning up to ninety five percent of the energy we absorb in the first part of our time on the ground during running stance. as we progress through the stance phase so that plays a big factor into what muscles we're using the positions that we're in the amount of excursion that we go through for range of motion flexibility those types of things that's really important to understand is a big difference that elasticity is a critical aspect for running with walking we depend on utilizing ground reaction forces to reduce the active demand of walking because we don't get the same amount of elastic return as running so because we're on the ground for a lot longer some of that elastic return is dampened and then we are using muscles in different patterns we're going through different amounts of excursion and even some of the timing of things is different because we're not using some of those elastic properties for example with walking we rely on the quadriceps and hamstrings to progress the body forward as we go from loading response which ends when our foot is flat on the ground to mid stance an athlete that has weakness in the quadriceps and glutes may display changes in their walking mechanics to compensate for these weaknesses correcting this with gait retraining may contribute to improved utilization of the glutes and quadriceps that can assist them when they're doing other activities like running and sprinting mechanics if you then train them to use that. So there's a big caveat there that we can't expect. Again, I want people to truly understand this, that we are not saying that you can just change their walking and expect their running to change. But what we're saying is that by utilizing, optimizing their walking analysis, we can get advantages that make a big difference when they are participating in other higher level activities. If you never looked at the walk-in in the first place, you really could have missed a great opportunity to make improvements with each and every step. That's why WalkingGate is such a valuable tool. It's a low impact way to assess movement patterns and joint health without the intensity and potential wear and tear of running. So far before somebody's necessarily ready to get back to running, This makes it really useful to evaluate running for preventing injuries before they happen. And I think it really should be done early and often. And this is something in my practice, we are looking at walking often. And now we're even looking at it with a finer tooth comb and seeing great results as a result of incorporating that into our plan of care. So we can't, unfortunately, just stand back and watch somebody walk though. Gait is a very intricate balance of strength, mobility, and technique that needs to have objective data. luckily technology has come a long way in helping to better understand the gate mechanics you know at run dna we have tools like the helix red which does give us a very detailed objective look as an athlete's walking gate we get real-time data and can pinpoint exactly where the inefficiencies or asymmetries are and then create a plan to address it with immediate results we can incorporate strengthening exercises mobility or even just slight adjustments to their technique With the addition of our walking score, we're also able to quantify the amount of improvement that athletes are making, which is both helpful for us to see how they're progressing, but also it's very motivating for the athletes to be able to understand exactly how they're progressing as well and if their efforts are producing results. The best part, we can make these changes before the athlete even hits the field or track. It's a proactive approach to performance optimization and injury prevention well before they can even take their first step running. So this season on the Running Day podcast, we're going to spend time talking about common walking gait or abnormalities and how this can impact overall function. Things like terminal extension, asymmetry, spatio-temporal characteristics, and more. Correcting these imbalances in walking when the stakes are low makes a huge difference when the athlete starts performing at higher intensities. So there you have it. Walking gait might seem like a small piece of the puzzle, but it's actually one of the most important elements to get right if you want to optimize athletic performance and avoid injuries. If you're an athlete or if you work with athletes, I really encourage you to start paying attention to walking. It could be the key to unlocking the next level of performance and results both for you and for your athletes. So if you want to learn more, please subscribe to this podcast. If you're looking to accelerate your expertise, check out the Certified Walking Gate Analyst course at rundna.com. But please let us know if you have any comments or thoughts about things you'd like to learn and we'd love to hear if you're utilizing walking gate with your athletes and how you've incorporated this in I think it's a missing piece of the puzzle that just it's the most functional thing most of our athletes do on a daily basis and if we're not looking at it we really could be missing out so thanks for tuning in and always wishing you a happy and healthy life and we'll see you next time on the running a podcast