The eccentric aspect of the shuffle walk

Hey guys, I’m an Osteopath from Australia and am a keen follower of your work. I just had a quick question about your tib ant training via the shuffle gait. I am comfortable with the theory behind it, my only issue is that clinically, tib ants role as an eccentric controller of pronation is significant. Therefore, shouldn’t we develop an exercise which trains it in an eccentric fashion? perhaps there is some controlled pronation in the shuffle gait that I have missed, but i’m interested to hear your thoughts as they are thoughts I respect! Thanks very much for all your work, it’s great to see practitioners using evidence based practice in a creative and practical way. Cheers, D

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our response:

Hi D. Good question and it is a major point.. If you think about the exercise, you are slowly putting the ball of the foot back on the ground AND maintaining the arch as best as possible. In essence, the arch will drop a bit as your weight is born on the foot, so it will pronate, but you are trying to hold it up, so in a manner of speaking you are controlling the arch descent, so you are eccentrically focusing on the activity. If we were to reshoot the video, this would be part of teh dialogue, because we do have our clients focus on this.  Remember, we are giving this exercise to many folks who have pronation control issues (yes, and ankle rocker issues) so we are kinda hitting the aspect you are questioning.  How this helps a bit.  As they get better, they take bigger steps in the shuffle walk, so that means more acceleration of the prontation, so they will have to try to maintain the arch under greater loads…….hence, more eccentric focus.  That is the way we see it anyways.