Gait Analysis: How to Improve Athletic Performance

Ask any athlete if they would like to improve their athletic performance, and the answer will be a resounding “yes.” Even hobby athletes want to run faster at the track, kick higher in the dojang, and swing harder with that racquet. Professionals care even more since their public standing and livelihoods depend on top performance and rapid healing from injury.

Naturally, improving performance is easier said than done, as anyone who has tried to beat their record – let alone someone else’s – will tell you. That is where good data comes in.

Whether you work in athletic performance improvement, define workflows and research protocols, or coach athletes to greater heights, such data can help you achieve your goals. Enter gait analysis.

While the human gait comes naturally to everyone over 2 years of age, it is nevertheless an extremely complex sequence of events. Knowing how stride, foot strike, stance, and other factors affect performance is critical to making improvements, but that kind of information is lamentably hard to come by, especially at the level of granularity needed to make small but important tweaks to movement.

Luckily, today’s plantar pressure and gait measurement tools make enhancing performance at the university or professional level easier. They smooth the road for clinicians and even help enhance footwear design. Let us look at how improving your gait analysis techniques can help you improve athletic performance overall.

Gait Analysis 101

If you work in the field of athletics, then you took Gait Analysis 101 a long time ago. However, even seasoned professionals often lack the complete picture of the athlete’s gait, whether running or walking, standing or swinging, and everything in between.

Gait analysis is the study of how we move. While “movement” might seem like a straightforward process of flow, it is composed of many distinct elements, all of which need measurement if you want a complete picture of gait. Among them are:

• Foot strike;
• Stance phase;
• Stride length;
• Cadence;
• Muscle imbalances;
• Potential inefficiencies; and
• Running economy.

In some realms of athletics, you must understand all the above. In others, some rise to the top more than others. For instance, no running is involved in golf, but how the individual plants and finds their center of gravity and shifts it is of the utmost importance.

Reasons for Gait Analysis

The primary purpose of gait analysis is to help the athlete improve. This remains true whether we’re discussing rugby, ice hockey, American football, or any other sport.

Gait analysis has many uses, from helping to identify the source of problems (whether they arise from the muscles, nerves, or bones) to pinpointing where pain comes from. It can also help diagnose congenital or acquired conditions, nerve and muscle dysfunction, and degenerative disorders.

While the latter does not impact athletes as much as it does the general population, congenital issues, and acquired or compensatory movement strategies certainly do. Moreover, they can hamper an athlete’s performance mightily.

The good news is that gait analysis is extremely non-invasive. Before trying any more significant intervention (steroid shots or surgery, among other possibilities), performing an in-depth gait assessment is always helpful to see what you can discover. With the correct deductions and treatments/footwear, you can permanently avoid anything more invasive.

The Many Athletic Ramifications of Gait

Collecting gait data, whether to help someone heal or for sports biomechanics research (or any other reason), is critical for understanding precisely what happens during motion. There are, of course, many types of motion, making it even more important to drill down into the intricacies of each. Subtopics of gait may include:

Standing

Yes, standing matters to gait. Whether it is highly temporary (as in the swing phase, when one leg is planted on the ground), short (a golf swing), or a long period of standing (say, waiting for a shot on the volleyball court), it is critical to understand how a stationary position affects the individual.

Walking

Moving from step to step is of obvious importance to any athlete. While many sports involve rapid movement, walking with good balance is critical. If athletes compensate for injury or imbalances, they may end up deepening problems that impact their importance.

Running

Runners—or athletes who use running in their sport—must address various issues, of which speed is only the simplest. How efficiently they move, how they use their breath, and how they balance all begin with the first step.

Swinging

Swinging is critical for baseball, golf, volleyball, and other sports. If athletes cannot balance accurately and compensate for twisting movements, they will not achieve the best results.

Of course, strength, flexibility, mobility, and proper footwear also play into this. Clinicians, therapists, coaches, and athletic directors cannot hope to address gait issues until they:

1. Understand how gait is impacting performance.
2. Design the appropriate interventions to treat them, then validate such treatments using data.

It is time for the intelligent insole.

Intelligent Insoles by XSENSOR Make Gait Analysis Easy

You are good at your job for a reason. You have put in the time and the study, and you are capable of designing incredibly complex protocols to discern even the most niggling detail of gait, often issues others have been unable to find. You are prepared to deal with complex.

But what if it does not need to be that hard? What if the right equipment can give you that extra layer of data and insight you have been looking for without tossing your current protocols on the scrap heap and starting from scratch?

That’s precisely what XSENSOR’s gait and motion insoles are here to help you do. Ditto our walkways and stance pads, all designed to combine gait analysis with cutting-edge biomechanical assessments. Our data-centric software and hardware systems help you identify imbalances, abnormalities, and issues hindering athletic performance.