The Importance of Gait

When something hurts, your body is remarkably good at finding ways around the pain. Without even thinking about it, you may shift your weight to the other leg, shorten your stride, stiffen a joint, or lean to one side as you walk. ⁠ ⁠These adjustments are called “movement compensations,” and in the short term, they do exactly what they’re designed to do: protect a painful area and let you keep moving. Research shows that pain changes the way your muscles turn on and off, and alters the signals between your brain, spinal cord, and muscles, which is why your walking pattern can change the moment pain appears (1). ⁠ ⁠The problem is that these helpful shortcuts are not meant to be permanent. When a compensation sticks around, it changes how force travels through your body. Weight that should be shared evenly gets redirected onto joints, tendons, and muscles not built to carry it in that way, or in that amount. This leads to an unfavorable chain reaction: pain leads to altered movement, altered movement leads to uneven or excessive loading, and that abnormal loading irritates tissue.

⁠Over time, repeated small stresses can add up faster than the body can repair them, turning minor irritation into a new injury in a completely different area than where you began (2). A limp from a sprained ankle, for example, can end up overloading the opposite hip, the knees, or the lower back. ⁠ ⁠This is where your deep stabilizing muscles matter most. The lower abdominal muscles and the gluteal muscles work together as a foundation that keeps your pelvis level and your spine, hips, and knees properly aligned every time you take a step. When these muscles activate well, force is distributed evenly, and your joints stay centered and protected. ⁠ ⁠When they’re weak or slow to switch on, the pelvis can drop or rotate excessively, and the knee can collapse inward, stressing the lower back and knee and increasing the risk of pain and injury. The most important step is to understand how to consciously engage these muscles, then translate this feeling into your desired movement.

⁠At Canyon Ranch, we provide a Functional Movement Analysis to help evaluate your gait abnormalities and identify relative compensations that may relate to pain, injuries, or surgical interventions (e.g., joint replacements). A key part of this service involves a focused evaluation of the area of concern prior to your gait analysis, including neurological and regional joint examinations, to determine the mechanism that caused the injury at the onset. Once we determine the mechanism and complete the gait analysis, we make corrections and provide treatment to allow the affected joints to move as designed. ⁠ ⁠If pain is changing the way you move, it’s essential to identify the cause and create a plan to keep you moving well before moving often. ⁠

References 

1. Bertrand-Charette et al., Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2022; Sterling et al., The Journal of Pain, 2001 

2. Wang and Zhu, Scientific Reports, 2025; Kalkhoven et al., Sports Medicine, 2021