The Bouncy Gait: Premature heel rise gait. Taking another look.

This is a great video example of a premature heel rise during gait. You should be able to clearly see it on the left foot (and this was toned down after we brought it to his awareness!).  The heel rise occurs early in the stance phase of gait, instead of the late stance phase.

We have talked about this bouncy type vertically oriented gait many times in blog posts and in our podcasts.  This is a pretty prevalent problem in the world, mostly because so many people have impaired ankle rocker/dorsiflexion from weak anterior compartments and short/tight posterior compartments.  None the less, for the majority, this is a pathologic gait pattern and it will impart undue stress into the posterior mechanism (calf-achilles complex). Just think about it, this person is going vertical at or prior to the tibia achieving 90degrees (perpendicular to the ground) instead of continuing to progress the tibia to 110+ degrees to enable normal timely pronation and foot biomechanical events.  This is not a normal gait. Period. This will change the function of the entire posterior chain upward. 

If you want to see another great example  from the frontal plane, check out this cute video representation of a vertial/premature heel rise bouncy gait. 

This gait style is caused by a premature heel rise from joint range limitation and/or from premature engagement of the gastrosoleus (and sometimes even the long toe flexors, you will see them hammering and curled in many folks). It can be a learned habitual pattern and nothing more, we have even seen it even in child-parental gait modeling in our offices. These people will never get to NORMAL full late-midstance of gait (without biomechanical compromise) and thus never achieve full hip extension nor adequate ankle dorsiflexion / ankle rocker. The gait cycle is an orchestrated symphony of timely events and when one or several timely events are omitted or impaired the mechanics are passed into other areas for compensation. This vertical gait style is very inefficient in that the gluteals cannot adequately power into hip extension into a forward progression drive, because the calf is prematurely generating vertical movement through ankle plantarflexion.  This strategy is sometimes deployed because the person actually is significantly ankle dorsiflexion (ankle rocker) deficient.  Meaning, they hit the limitations of dorisflexion and in order to progress forward they first have to go vertical.  This vertical motion, because they are moving into ankle plantarflexion, re-buys more ankle dorsiflexion range which then can be used if they so choose. Obviously, the remedy is to find the functional deficit, remove it and retrain the pattern.  There are a whole host of other problems that go with this compensation pattern but we wanted our mission to stay focused today.  Remember, this is usually a subconscious motor pattern compensation. Is it like the toe walking issue we talked about last week (post link here) ? It is similar in some ways and can have primitive and postural motor pattern implications. We will follow up the “Idiopathy Toe Walking Gait: Part 2” shortly but we wanted to strategically put this blog post ahead of it, because there are similar characteristics and implications. Trust us, there is a method to our madness :)

Shawn and Ivo

The Gait Guys