✔️ 2022-04-18 00:06:50 – Paris/France.
In the end, like many of us, I get into the bad habit of lying on my couch and mindlessly opening apps on my phone. Once I get bored with Instagram and Strava, I often open my iPhone's Health app to check my daily stats. I'll go through my time in bed, step count and heart rate variability and then I'll scroll through all the gait analysis numbers but to be honest that's all they are really for me: numbers. I don't know what to look for, or what the stats really say. Does having double 25,9% support time mean that I'm walking badly?
For more context, I recently hopped on a call with Hila Glick, BPT, Vice President of Physical Therapy and Patient Experience at OneStep, a digital physical therapy platform. Among other things, the company's app uses gait analysis on smartphones to gather information about the overall health of its patients.
“We look at different parameters, such as the speed and length of the patient's steps, the consistency of the patient's gait, the appearance of one step compared to the next,” explains Glick. Although OneStep PTs never consider a single parameter, taken together as part of the bigger picture, these stats can tell a story. Here, Glick shares what some of the numbers can tell us about our own health and fitness.
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Support time doubled
This is the phase of your walk where both feet are on the ground. A faster gait will generally lead to a lower number here, as you'll likely have a faster roll from foot to foot. The average is between 20 and 40%, according to Apple.
"We can learn a lot about a patient who spends too much time on both legs," says Glick. “It could be a signal that someone might be feeling unstable. In that case, says Glick, they would work together on balance exercises and fall prevention.
Gait asymmetry
Glick points out that humans are not symmetrical creatures. “Our face isn't perfectly symmetrical and our gait isn't perfectly symmetrical,” she says. The average gait asymmetry for healthy young adults is between 5 and 15 percent, while older adults are typically closer to 15 to 20 percent, according to a study published in the journal. Medicine and science in sport and exercise.
"If someone is very consistent with asymmetry, we can be calm about it," says Glick. But his team is keeping an eye out for spikes to see if a patient suddenly favors a leg. This could mean that one side has become weaker than the other or that he is limping from pain. Or, it could just mean that they started carrying a bag over one shoulder or walking on an uneven road. Like all of these gait analysis statistics, they must be considered in context.
stride length
Just as it sounds, it measures the distance you travel with each step. It's a super individual number, and varies a lot from person to person, although it depends on your height (obviously) and your gender, and it usually decreases with age because mobility, or range of motion is generally reduced and balance becomes more of a challenge. It's also not as related to your walking speed as you might assume: "Some people walk with shorter but very quick strides, others have longer strides and walk relatively slowly," says Glick. Rather than looking for a specific number, she says, the main goal here really should be to feel comfortable and stable and able to maintain your stride for a long period of time. You do you.
Stair speed: up and down
Glick points out that stairs can be a major issue for some patients. “Some people are afraid of them and avoid them,” she says. But even if you don't have stairs in your home, mastering movement is essential for everyday life for most of us, whether it's going up or down a sidewalk, or climb a few stairs to enter a building, she points out. When her team notices an unusually slow speed that indicates someone is closing one foot after the other with each step, they check to see if it could be a knee pain, stability or cardiovascular health issue.
Average walking heart rate
If your smartphone is connected to a fitness watch, you'll probably also be able to see your walking heart rate. Walking should be a low-to-moderate intensity activity, which means it should be between 50-70% of your maximum heart rate. But rather than looking at a particular number, Glick says the key is to pay attention to how you feel when you walk – you don't want your heart beating so fast that you have to stop and rest a minute after walking. to the mailbox.
The bigger picture
So why are all these statistics important? Glick points out that in general, for those of us who can walk, doing so more often and being mindful of the quality of our walking is one of the best things we can do for our health. "That's how we move, not with squats, not with swimming," she says. “We travel the world on foot, so we want to make sure that this basic skill is exercised to the best possible quality. »
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SOURCE: Reviews News
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