The Walking Code: My Personal Journey
Chapter 1
My Personal Journey
I have been a practicing physician in the specialty of family medicine since 1997, when I completed my medical residency at UCSD Medical Center in San Diego, California. However, the field of medicine is not where I derived my understanding of walking. As with most other physicians, I have spent much of my medical career not even being aware that walking was a medical issue. My only exposure to walking as a medical concern was in recognizing when people had neurological impairments affecting their ability to walk. Conditions like Parkinson's disease, strokes, cerebral palsy, and conditions affecting the spine affect normal gait patterns, and it is important for physicians to be able to recognize when these conditions are present. However, the fact that otherwise healthy individuals could suffer pain or damage from poor walking technique was not something that was taught in my medical training, nor in the training of any of the physicians I know.
Understanding the importance of walking mechanics for me did not come from my study of medicine, but instead from the study of dance. Outside of my career in medicine, I have been teaching and performing Argentine tango since 1995 (Figures 4 and 5). In this profession I have been teaching body mechanics for over 20 years. But even as a tango instructor, I did not always understand the importance of proper body mechanics in normal walking. My turning point came one day in 2005 when I was walking down the street holding hands with my wife and dance partner, Marizabel.
Figure 4
Figure 5
As we were walking down the street, my wife asked me kindly to stop holding her hand. Naturally I was taken aback. The reason she gave me that I was yanking her shoulder because I was pitching forward when I walked. I figured I must have been not paying attention and assured her I would stop yanking her arm. I took her hand again and began to walk in a very conscious manner with the best posture possible. I didn't make it five steps before she pulled her hand away and said I was still pitching forward and yanking her arm. I had zero awareness that I was doing this. In fact, I was more than a bit incredulous that, as a professional tango performer, I was being told that I didn't know how to walk down the street correctly. But I also knew that my wife has a gifted kinesthetic sensibility, and if she felt I was pitching over, then I was pitching over.
I learned two primary lessons from this experience. First of all, I learned that I was not applying my knowledge of dance to my everyday walking. I had compartmentalized my dancing as a separate and distinct way of functioning, but it is not. I realized then that I needed to make a connection between my manner of functioning both on and off the dance floor. My dance instructor, Ive Simard, always used to say, "You dance who you are, and you can't move one way when you walk through the door of the studio and then dance in another way." For some reason, at the time, I had not made this connection. The second thing I learned after contemplating Ive's teachings was that if my walking had issues, my dancing must also have issues. I took this as a welcome challenge. I knew then that I had to go back to the drawing board and really do some analysis of both the nature of the dance and of normal walking. Being so closely linked, the one could not be perfected without perfecting the other.
After becoming more aware of my walking deficits, I reflected back on some other walking related situations I had confronted in the past. One of those was that my mother would frequently complain that when I walked with her, I would always walk ahead of her. She thought it was very inconsiderate, but I knew that it wasn't intentional on my part. I always felt that my mom just walked so slow that no one could possibly slow down enough to match her. Even when I tried matching her pace step by step, I would still quickly pull ahead of her. I didn't realize that my inability to slow the pace of my walking was evidence that I was not walking correctly. I just considered myself a natural fast walker. I thought it was an asset. What I realize now is that I was allowing gravity to pull me forward because of the incorrect way I was using my core.
I was also unaware that my tendency to wear out the insides of the soles of my shoes was further evidence of my incorrect walking technique. I was always told that it was caused by my flat feet. Now that I have learned to walk correctly, and no longer wear out the insides of my shoes, I realize that having flat feet had nothing to do with it. When I fixed my way of functioning, the form of my feet, and of my shoes, was corrected. No arch supports were needed. Had I not corrected this issue when I did, those same stresses could have caused permanent damage to my knees and hips, the same damage that affects so many of my patients.
The Connection Between Teaching Dance and Teaching Walking
When I became aware of my own problems with walking, I began to pay much more attention to the walking patterns of both my patients and my dance students. I began to notice that my students who had the most problems with learning to dance shared many of the same movement characteristics of my patients coming in with unexplained pain. Something in the way they functioned was not only affecting their ability to dance but also putting them at risk for pain. I realized then that having "two left feet" is actually a potential medical condition, or at least a precursor to one. From that time I have dedicated myself to help people correct these functional issues, hopefully before it becomes too late.
Correcting my own walking technique was only the first step. I had been teaching dance for years, but connecting dance technique to walking technique in a way that was teachable and reproducible was another story. The real breakthrough came when I began studying Tai Chi. In studying the theory underneath the foundation of Tai Chi, I found a universal connection between Tai Chi, dance, and basic everyday walking. It then took another 7 years to develop it into a complete system of core movement analysis that could be applied consisitently to all three disciplines. I call this system the Quantum Movement System. It includes the Walking Code, the Tai Chi Code, the Tango Code, and also the Running Code. The Walking Code is the focus of this book. Using the Walking Code, you can understand the exact movements of the core required to maintain perfect posture and body aligment with any movement and at the same time minimize impact forces on the joints and connective tissues.