GAIT TRAINING

At Footform, we're proud to be one of the few resources to learn basic, balanced Gait and Posture. Freedom from pain and strain is the motivator. Improved athletic performance is a side benefit.

The focus of this program is on walking with optimal form and technique.

Gait & Posture Training
Our shoe selections offer unique features such as comfort, fit, durability, quality, function and compatibility with orthotics that other brands simply cannot provide. Personalizing is how we fit your foot with length, width, shims, stretching, grinding and custom orthotics. The result is luxury for your feet.

About Posture
Good posture is a pre-requisite to a good gait and there is a lot more to good posture than standing up straight. Your default posture (how you stand, sit and move without thinking) is a habit. People think you're born with posture or somehow inherit it. The truth about posture is that it is a learned skill.

Good posture is when you can move freely and easily to do anything you need to do, instantly. Bad posture is when you lock your joints to brace your skeleton against itself to stay up. This locks out movement and makes any new movement an awkward process that strains muscles and joints.

About Gait
Our stone-age ancestors had to rely on instant athletic movement to save their lives. To cover long distances, hunt or avoid being hunted, an athletic body was a necessity. As human kind became more civilized, ideas about movement and culture got in the way of natural movement. We embraced cars, mass transportation and grocery stores. In general, nothing in our culture demands athletic movement for survival. It must be learned through training. What you want for your gait is balance, timing and alignment for an optimized path of force, from the ground up.

Tips to Get Better
In the U.S. many people lock their knees both standing and walking. The result is overloading the forefoot pad, home of the joints between the toes and foot. If your knees don't bend your ankles don't bend. If your ankles don't bend you overload the forefoot pad during movement. The load of your whole body is supposed to be shared between the heel pad and the forefoot pad. The other bad side effect of locked knees; you don't move your hips correctly while walking. Many Americans use their hips as a hinge joint rather than the natural ball-and-socket joint, a cultural habit that is linked to hip damage and lower back pain.

The Tips
Three things to think over and over. Get them stuck in your head, like a song or commercial can get stuck in repetition.

• Neutral knees: Never lock your knees, make sure they can always wiggle.
  
  
• Feel my heels: Make sure you're sharing your weight with the forefoot and heel pad.


• Hula: Like doing a hula hoop in micro-motion. It loosens your hips, and the constant motion keeps you checking heels, knees and core.