Pronating around internal hip rotation loss.
This is a remedial principle, but it is always nice to capture it on video like this. Watch this clients left foot. On initial impressions you might just say too much foot pronation, and you would be right. Some of you might say abductor-adductor twist of the foot. These are all correct. But, if we told you that this was a hip complaint client, and lack of internal hip rotation this foot action should be a simple 60Watt “light bulb moment” (translation: “epiphany”), certainly not a 100Watt moment (but for some it might be).
This client cannot internally rotate through the hip adequately, so they have found the opposite end of the limb to internally rotate through. They collapse through the arch/tripod, which essentially in the crudest of analogies “internally screws the limb” into the ground. They are finding internal femur rotation through foot pronation. Internal hip rotation is being achieved from a bottom up process if you will. Pronation through the foot complex is adduction, medial rotation and plantarflexion of the talus which will carry the tibia (and thus the femur) with it into internal rotation. There is a problem in many clients who find that extra little bit of rotation at the hip via a foot/ankle cheat. That problem is one of corruption of the pelvis antiphasic motion of the pelvis, they will most often dump the same hip laterally and thus drift into the frontal plane instead of achieving the antiphasic motion of the pelvis. This will decouple the rotation of the torso in the opposite rotation of the pelvis, and thus begin the corruption of arm swing. Want to take it another level deeper ? Ok, eat this for lunch……. asymmetrical thoracic rotation from side to side will set up. This will mean more work through scapulothoracic stabilization and cervical rotation on the side of the thoracic rotation deficit. Still not deep enough ? Ok, evaluate their respiration symmetry. Too many are doing respiratory work before hip rotation is clean and symmetrical, especially during gait that necessitates 1000′s of engraining steps a day. If the hips are not clean, gait is not clean, and that means repetitive arm swing-thoracic-respiratory mechanics are not clean.
If you want to truly fix someones rooted problems, you have to be willing and able to go down the rabbit hole.
Shawn Allen, one of the gait guys
