Legs like the Oars in a Boat
A good way to illustrate why a posterior driven gait is a more efficient way of walking is to think of the analogy of a boat on the water. If you have an oar and wish to paddle the boat you won't get very far by just reaching the paddle forward and dropping it in the water. Instead, you need to drive the oar into the water and pull backwards in order to propel the boat forward. The legs may be thought of in the same way: in order to propel your body forward, you need to drive the standing leg into the ground and then pull that leg backwards. It's helpful to think of the motion from coming from the back of the knee or thigh rather than the foot, because if the focus is on the foot, there may be a tendency to bend from the knee. To extend the metaphor, your oar in the boat will not be very effective if it's floppy like a spaghetti noodle and your leg is more effective if the knee if the whole leg is sturdy and the knee doesn't collapse. Try walking thinking of the legs like oars in a boat.
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Head Ramping
When you've shifted your hips back and dropped your ribs down for a more neutral and vertical alignment you may find that your neck and head tend to thrust forward. This may already be an ingrained habit from how we sit and how we read/look at computer screens, etc. Often people tend to tilt and rotate their head back in order to look straight ahead, but that doesn't fix the problem of the weight of the head pulling the neck and upper spine forward. So a great habit and exercise to develop is "head ramping". This can be done at any time, but especially while walking. Like on a ramp, you think of your head as sliding back and up. It's helpful to think of the chin sliding back towards the throat as the top of the head yearns upward. Make sure while you do this that the ribs don't come up as you head ramp, and you'll lengthen the back of the neck and elongate the upper spine.
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Vary Your Gait Width
We started the program with finding a gait width that is pelvis width apart. That helps us develop a straighter, vertical leg that will increase our hip strength, stability and balance. However, while walking the needs of the terrain really determine where you need to place your feet. So, it's a good idea to practice variable widths in stance and walking gait when you come upon things in your path such as a curb, a log, or even rail road tracks. This gives you an opportunity to walk with one foot in front of the other like on a balance beam. Then you can alternate between pelvis width gait and balance beam gait to master whatever terrain you come upon.
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Vary Your Terrain
Aside from conventional shoes, another way our bodies are "casted" to move less is by walking consistently on flat and level ground (sidewalks, cement, the floors in buildings). To add more movement into your body and to increase your balance and stability, find ways to walk off the beaten path and look for variety in terrain. Even stepping from a sidewalk onto the grass is a good addition to the input you are giving your body. Plus, looking for side paths adds more adventure to your walk!
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Arm Swing
Arm swing is an important component of your walking gait in that it counterbalances the swing of the opposite leg. Tension in the upper body can suppress this reflexive motor program, but through awareness and practice, you can awaken this natural movement! Also, notice how the arms are swinging: do they reach forward or do they reach back? How you reach your arms probably corresponds with how you reach your leg. We want to build a posterior driven gait, so just as you want to drive your leg backwards instead of reaching forwards, you want to practice reaching your arms backwards instead of reaching forwards!
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Contentment Along the Way
Walking can bring you to destinations that can bring you joy such as a beautiful viewpoint. But conscious walking can be a source of contentment in itself. Awareness of how you body is moving can bring you into a meditative and peaceful stay. Knowing your body is moving toward better health can give you a sense of empowerment. Then, the journey and act of walking brings about contentment, and the destination is just the icing on the cake.
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Frankenstein's Monster Walk
Here's a variation of the "Monster walk" but to travel forward rather than sideways. When you do a regular hip list, your waist on the side of the lifted leg shortens as that side of your pelvis comes closer to your ribs. It this variation, try to hold one side of your body stiff like a plank so your waist doesn't shorten, and when you lift the leg, tilt the whole body to the side. It's another way to practice the hip list emphasizing control of the lateral hips, but it looks a lot like the classic Frankenstein's Monster's walk!
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Rib Breathing
How you walk will affect your breathing and also how you breathe will affect your walking. If you have a habit of lifting/thrusting the ribs, for example, it's likely you'll feel your breath moving your belly or your upper chest and shoulders. Unfortunately, that may result in less core support, more lower back discomfort, and excessive tension in the neck, shoulder and chest area. Once you drop your ribs, you'll give your core more opportunity to support your torso, and you'll open up the ability to breathe deeper into the ribs. To experience this, place your hands on your waist and slide them a bit higher to hold the sides of your lower ribs. As you breathe in, try to send the breath into the ribs making the ribcage widen and feel the ribcage push your hands wider apart. Then as you breathe out, feel your ribs funnel downward and inward bringing your hands closer together. The mobility of the ribs will help your breathing and decrease the tension in both your lower back and upper torso.
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Swinging Arms: straight ahead, not sideways
Because many of our daily activities tend toward placing our shoulders in an "internally rotated" position (think how you hold your silverware, read a book, type on the computer, drive your car, etc.) our arm swing, while walking, have a tendency to reflect that. This presents itself as the arms swinging across the body from side to side. The weight of the arms moving across the body causes more twist and torque of the torso and is not as efficient at counterbalancing the swing of the legs. So, while you walk, bring your attention to your arms swinging straight forward and back (on the sagittal plane) and see if you feel a difference!
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Listen to Your Footsteps
A cool way to give yourself some feedback as to whether or not your lateral hips (the muscles that control the hip list) are engaging well in your walking gait is to listen for the sound of your footsteps. If your heel strike is audible with a big “thud”, that’s a pretty good indication you are falling forward onto the next step. If your heel strike is soft or barely audible, then you know you’re on the right track. The term Heelstrike can be a bit misleading because it seems to indicate striking the ground with a lot of force. I would prefer the term, Heel Touch or Heel Connect because your lateral hips can control the downward phase of the hip as the leg swings forward and the heel can come softly to the ground. This helps mitigate the force of impact your body has with the ground on each step, it can save your joints, and also keeps you from experiencing the micro-whiplashes caused by falling onto your foot with each step.
Take a listen to the audio and see if you can hear the difference. Then try it out while you walk!
You could also use this as a walking meditation to draw your awareness both into your body and your senses as you connect your feet to the earth.
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Groucho Marx Walk
This is a silly walk that emphasizes the hip list, arm and leg swing, and engages the backside of the body. Hinge at the hip to pitch the upper body forward, while sending your weight back on the heels (as you would for a forward fold hamstring stretch). From that position, list onto one leg and swing the opposite arm and leg together. Swing the leg forward to take a step, but try to keep all the weight on the heel. Step onto the leg that swung forward and repeat the process. Put it together to walk forward: still pitched forward in the upper body, hinged at the hip, swinging opposite arm and legs, and keeping the weight on the heels. This is akin to a classic Groucho Marx walk. As you feel the engagement of the backside of your legs moving your forward, gradually hinge to stand upright, and continue your walk.
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Ear Plugs to Hear Your Heel Strike
To get a better sense of how hard your heel is striking the ground and to tell if you are controlling the downward phase of the hiplist, try using earplugs! When you wear earplugs you might be able to hear the reverberation caused by each heel strike. If you are falling hard onto the next foot, it will probably seem pretty loud. If you are controlling the descent of your hiplist, your heel strike should be much quieter. For fun, try to walk silently.
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Crescent Stretch
Having a supple and strong core is an important part of your walking gait. When you list the pelvis (stand on one leg) the standing side elongates the waist while the lifting side shortens the waist. If your waist and lower back are tight or resist moving and changing shape, then those restrictions may affect how you walk. A simple stretch to do between bouts of walking is the Crescent Stretch. This is essentially a side bend: keep your hips in place stacked over your heels, and tilt to the side to bring one side of your rib cage closer to the pelvis as the other side lengthens away from the pelvis. This will help stretch the muscles on the elongated side. Then to strengthen those same muscles just focus on the waist muscles contracting to bring your body upright. To add a little more load for a deeper stretch and strengthening activity, just extend your arms overhead while you create the "c" curve of your side bend.
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Neutral Knee Pits
The Neutral Knee Pit is an alignment marker that will help you understand how your hip is rotating. If our hips have trouble engaging or stabilizing, a general tendency is for the thighs to internally rotate while walking and standing. You can experience this if you bend your knees and let your knees collapse together. If the hips chronically rotate inward, the feet might start to splay outward to compensate. As a consequence you might experience pain and wear and tear at the knee joint due to the torque created from the feet turning one way and the hips rotating the other. Also, when the hips are internally rotated the muscles around the hip don't have as much leverage to stabilize your thigh when you are in the balancing phase of walking (hip listing and standing on one leg). To begin to find better balance, hip stability, along with healthier ankles and knees, we need to learn what neutral rotation of the hip is. You might think that just by looking at the knee caps you can tell if your knee joint is pointing straight forward and back, but actually the kneecap can travel either side of the knee joint depending on which quadricep muscles are tighter. So, instead, look at the back of the knees - also known as the knee pit. The hamstring tendons pass over each side of the knee joint, when the hip is internally rotated, those tendons and the pit of the knee will appear to point out to the sides, when the hip is eternally rotated, the tendons and knee pit will appear to point towards each other. Neutral alignment and the best way to walk forward is when those tendons and knee pits are pointing straight backwards and are parallel to each other. You can draw on those tendons with a marker to make them more visible. Most of us need to work on the external rotation of the thigh, so while standing, rotate your thighs externally and bring your knee pits to neutral. Notice that the arches and insoles of the feet might lift. The rotation of the hip is a main component that stabilizes the arches of the feet. Once you've externally rotated the thighs and kept your foot on the ground, try standing on one leg. Notice if your ankle and thigh wobble inward and outward. Practice toward maintaining the external rotation while balancing on one leg and you'll find an improvement in your balance, your arches, and your knee health!
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Neutral Knee Pits While Walking
Try a slow motion walk while keeping the neutral knee-pit. Try it step by step: - Neutral stance - Externally rotate your thighs - Hip list to stand on one leg - Step forward - BUT before putting your weight down onto the next leg: externally rotate that thigh again. - Engage the front leg to pull your body forward while hip listing onto that leg. Keeping the external rotation. - Repeat the process again taking another step forward. Walking in slow motion is a great way to watch the tendency of the hips to collapse into internal rotation, and then to train your external hip rotators to remain engaged and keep your hips stable.
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Vary Your Distances
There's a lot of emphasis lately on getting in a certain number of steps per day. But I feel that being too concerned with a strict regimen can hinder then enjoyment of walking and the sense of accomplishment for any distance moved in a day. Plus, the body does best with lots of variance in not only types of movement but also with frequency and duration as well. My suggestion is to plan on walking varying distances throughout the week: some days, you may hike for 7 miles, others you may only walk 1 mile, and others you may walk by going to the store or simply around your room. Think of any movement as input for the body. Remember to celebrate and enjoy all the steps you take.
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Let The Earth Move Your Feet
Having mobile joints in your feet is important for being able to maintain balance, increasing the sensory feedback from your feet to your brain, and for your hip's ability to stabilize your leg while walking. It may seem prudent to avoid stepping on uneven objects on your path, but for the sake of mobilizing your feet, I suggest pausing your walk and spending a little time stepping onto an uneven and hard surface. This is easier done if you walk barefoot or with minimalist shoes, but you can practice simply by taking off your shoes for a short period during a walk. Find an object that is hard and uneven such as a rock and simply put your foot over it and apply pressure down. Put as much pressure as is tolerable but not painful. It should feel like a stretch. Shift your foot so that you apply pressure to as many parts of the foot and as many angles as possible. As you apply pressure, the intention is to allow the joints of the foot to mold over the object. The more your foot can conform to the earth underneath you, the better able you will be to adjust your balance and gait.
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Stepping up? Use Your Butt!
Walking uphill or climbing stairs is a great way to develop the hip and butt muscles for the posterior driven gait. But how you step up matters for your butt! Put your foot up onto the next step, and then observe how you tend to step up. Do you lean forward and use your hands on your knee? That's fine, but probably shows your legs may be tired or not have the strength to carry your body and so are utilizing the help of the arms. Does your knee shift forward over or past the toes and do you lean your body forward over the leg first before stepping up? That's also fine, but shows that your habit is to mostly use the quadriceps and your knee joints for walking up. I want to emphasize that any method of getting you where you want to go is the body's intelligence at work. But the body will tend to default to where it has the most strength already. So, to develop more hip and butt strength try this: rather than leaning your body forward or shifting your knee forward, when you step the foot up, keep that knee vertically over the ankle (don't let it shift forward), and use the leg to push down and pull back. As the leg straightens your body should be pulled up and on top of the leg. It may be challenging but this will develop that hip and butt strength for your posterior driven gait. Once again: Step up knee vertically over ankle push the leg down and pull back to bring your body up over the leg try to keep your body upright. Then when you walk on flatter ground you may really feel that posterior driven gait!
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Hip List All The Way Down
A common complaint in walking downhill is pain in the knees. This could be an indication of leading with the knee bending as you walk downhill and possibly falling forward onto the next step which results in more impact through the whole body and especially in the knees. One way to protect the knees and to walk with more control downhill is to use the hip list. In the case of walking downhill, you'll focus on the eccentric or lowering phase of the hip list. Although the knee of the standing leg will bend eventually depending on the steepness of the hill or the length of your gait, try to keep the legs as straight as possible until you have to bend the knee. This way you'll develop control of the lateral hip muscles to lower the next foot down. You can also add an exercise of lowering the leg that is reaching forward, but instead of taking the next step, back right up onto the previous foot. This will help you learn to keep control of the leg you're standing on without falling forward onto the next leg. Focus on downward listing as your walk downhill, and you'll feel much better in the knees!
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The Quad Stretch
A posterior driven gait requires that you have some amount of hip extension available. However, many of us lack the range of motion in the hip necessary due to the frequency of time we spend in hip flexion (think how often your thighs are in front of the hips). For this reason, it's important to "uncast" our hips from the position of our chairs, etc. by standing and stretching those hip flexors as much as possible. One fantastic stretch is the classic "runner's" stretch or quad stretch. Simply stand on one leg and grab the ankle of the other leg. You can use this stretch as a way to assess how much tension you carry in the front of the thighs in relation to how much strength you have in the back of the thighs.
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