We often get asked at the clinic, “Why do I keep getting injured? or What are the reasons that I get injured?”
Normally we can put these reasons down to one of four reasons.
- One is trauma. Somebody kicks you if you’re playing football or rugby or you go over your ankle in the garden or over a curb. So you’ve got the potential trauma.
- You’ve got what we call a muscle imbalance. What that means is some muscles work harder than others just because of the way we’re made.
- Unaccustomed activity, that might mean that you start running for the first time and if you’ve never run in your life and you try and run up the Malvern Hills and something will hurt or get damaged.
- The fourth reason we can often determine is your mechanics. or more directly mechanics of how you land your foot when you are walking or running, because if you are not landing your foot in an anatomical way that your body likes, we can then start to put pressure on other parts of your feet or your knees or your hips or your lower back.
Because that’s quite a common thing that people don’t land their feet in exactly a perfect anatomical way, we’ve got some computerised equipment, which is called a gait scan, which will do exactly that, scan your gait so we can see exactly where your weight goes through your foot so that we can determine if there’s any imbalances, which then can be causing injuries.
But of course, what that then also does is gives us the opportunity to see if we think something called a custom-made orthotic would be a good idea for you. It looks like something that you put in your shoe, but of course it’s made for you specifically. So it takes into account all your little habits and how your foot lands rather than something generic. You can see on the screen that we use we can determine a static and a dynamic impression of where your weight goes through your foot, and if that needs to be adjusted at all.
It’s quite a simple process. You just walk over a gait scan and as your foot lands on the plate, it reads your pressures, the scanner reads your pressures, and we can just determine where your weight’s going and if something needs to be done about that.
I hope that little bit of information is helpful. If that’s something that’s interesting to you, you’d like to have your gait looked at, you’re more than welcome just to give the clinic a call and we can have a conversation about that. It’s a really clever bit of kit. We been using it for a long, long time now, over 20 years.
The Americans & Australians are really strong on this type of intervention to help to prevent injuries. So if you want your gait looked at, please feel free to give us a call and we can see if we can organize that for you.
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