Human walking is several million years old. A clear visual evidence of this is the foot prints found in Laetoli in Africa. The foot prints originate presumably from our direct ancestor "Lucy", who is termed “australopithecus aferensis". The footprints were preserved because the humanoids walked in mud shortly after burst of a volcano. (Steven R. Leigh, et al 2001).
The human being is the only species, which places the heel on the ground before the forefoot, it is therefore believed that evolution has formed the human foot to a highly specialized structure and not a degenerated hand as often suggested. Human walking seems to be optimized in a way that makes it the most economical pattern of locomotion. It should be stressed that human walking is a highly sophisticated skill and unique to our species. If a person cannot walk, it is a severe handicap today and in the past it would have been deadly. Evaluating the physical health of a person or the success of neurology, orthopaedics and rehabilitation intervention of a patient may therefore very well be evaluated by gait analysis. (Christopher M.Powers, et al 1999).
Gait analysis is fast becoming an answer to past complexity of detailed analysis of human movements. Gait analysis has wide spread applications for ergonomics, artificial limb fitting, footwear, neuromuscular rehabilitation, orthopedics and other aspects of engineering applications that requires an in-depth knowledge of human movement. As per reason there are many researches on gait today with up to 5000 published articles in this decade alone.
Besides studies on joints, muscles activation and deactivation there are studies in; age (Ugo H, et al 2003) , gender (Kozlowski L, 1977), (S.H. Cho, et al 2003) , race (Chen W.L, et al 2001), geography (Saud Al-Obaidi, 2003), walking speed (Li Li, et al 2005), Osteoarthritis (Kaufman K.R, et al 2001), ACL deficiency (Wen Liu, et al 1999), patellofemoral pain (Powers C.M, et al 1999), and routine activities (Bergmann G, et al 2001). However, there are few if any published studies that compare gait characteristics for athletes of different sporting codes.
While there are many studies focus on understanding various facet of gait, there are not many researches on gait especially on those of sports and sports persons. The identification of differences in lower limb extremity kinematics movement between genders in athletes during an unexpected perturbation (Hurd W.J, et al 2004), is one of the references on gait when it comes to sports.
Other studies of different sporting group and its affect on lower limb kinematics are done on jump analysis, (Kevin R.Ford, et al 2003). To date there is no documentation of gait analysis among different sporting groups and adaptation of gait with age in Malaysia.
As an advocate of gait analysis and its benefits in Malaysia, I hope this article would encourage people to conduct more studies on selected Malaysian sporting population.
The human being is the only species, which places the heel on the ground before the forefoot, it is therefore believed that evolution has formed the human foot to a highly specialized structure and not a degenerated hand as often suggested. Human walking seems to be optimized in a way that makes it the most economical pattern of locomotion. It should be stressed that human walking is a highly sophisticated skill and unique to our species. If a person cannot walk, it is a severe handicap today and in the past it would have been deadly. Evaluating the physical health of a person or the success of neurology, orthopaedics and rehabilitation intervention of a patient may therefore very well be evaluated by gait analysis. (Christopher M.Powers, et al 1999).
Gait analysis is fast becoming an answer to past complexity of detailed analysis of human movements. Gait analysis has wide spread applications for ergonomics, artificial limb fitting, footwear, neuromuscular rehabilitation, orthopedics and other aspects of engineering applications that requires an in-depth knowledge of human movement. As per reason there are many researches on gait today with up to 5000 published articles in this decade alone.
Besides studies on joints, muscles activation and deactivation there are studies in; age (Ugo H, et al 2003) , gender (Kozlowski L, 1977), (S.H. Cho, et al 2003) , race (Chen W.L, et al 2001), geography (Saud Al-Obaidi, 2003), walking speed (Li Li, et al 2005), Osteoarthritis (Kaufman K.R, et al 2001), ACL deficiency (Wen Liu, et al 1999), patellofemoral pain (Powers C.M, et al 1999), and routine activities (Bergmann G, et al 2001). However, there are few if any published studies that compare gait characteristics for athletes of different sporting codes.
While there are many studies focus on understanding various facet of gait, there are not many researches on gait especially on those of sports and sports persons. The identification of differences in lower limb extremity kinematics movement between genders in athletes during an unexpected perturbation (Hurd W.J, et al 2004), is one of the references on gait when it comes to sports.
Other studies of different sporting group and its affect on lower limb kinematics are done on jump analysis, (Kevin R.Ford, et al 2003). To date there is no documentation of gait analysis among different sporting groups and adaptation of gait with age in Malaysia.
As an advocate of gait analysis and its benefits in Malaysia, I hope this article would encourage people to conduct more studies on selected Malaysian sporting population.
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