Your footsteps and gait tell us more than you might think!
To a physiotherapist, footsteps and walking are how we analyze how a client walks or their gait pattern. They tell us a picture about a client. As a physio, I watch how people walk and I find myself doing this all the time (inadvertently)!
The Role of Gait in Physiotherapy
Human gait depends on a complex interplay of major parts of the nervous, musculoskeletal, and cardiorespiratory systems. Gait or walking is influenced by age, personality, and sociocultural factors. Your preferred walking speed is a sensitive marker of general health. In fact, there are outcome measures and tests that we as physiotherapists use, such as the 6-minute walk test (6MWT) and the Timed Up and Go (TUAG).
- The 6MWT is used as a performance-based measure of functional exercise capacity in populations, including healthy older adults and people undergoing knee or hip joint replacement.
- The TUAG is used to determine fall risk and measures the progress of balance, sit to stand and walking. It is a simple screening test that is a sensitive and specific measure of probability for falls among older adults. An older adult who takes ≥12 seconds to complete the TUAG is at risk for falling.
Disorders of walking lead to a loss of freedom, risk of falls and injuries can result in a significant decrease in the quality of one’s life.
What Do Physiotherapists Look At?
In my other role as an advance practice physiotherapist with the hip and knee arthritis program, we assess patients for hip and knee replacement. The way someone walks gives us clues into what the problem or injury may be. We look at
- how someone walks
- how they compensate
- and whether they walk with a limp, a stiff knee, a hitched hip, a rotated leg, a trunk lurch or a flat foot, etc.
We also observe
- the length of someone’s step
- the stride
- the speed at which someone walks
- the base of support with which someone walks
- the angle of the foot and the angle of the hip
- how the sole of the shoe is worn
An analysis of each component of the different phases of ambulation is an essential part of the diagnosis of various neurologic disorders. It also allows the assessment of a client’s progress during the rehabilitation phase when recovering from an injury, surgery, or disease process.
Ultimately as a physio good knowledge of anatomy and biomechanics is the foundation of understanding the different parts of walking – when you know what’s normal you can see what’s going wrong when a patient presents with an abnormal gait and this allows us to provide the correct treatment.