Baguazhang poles from Lenny! Thanks Lenny, I hope that you're doing well enjoying the summer and still practicing!
Walking requires a huge number of signals between your brain and the muscles in your arms, chest, back, abdomen, pelvis, legs, ankles and feet.
Something that looks relatively straightforward is in fact incredibly complex. And the pace and smoothness of your walk can be an indicator of your health and how well you are aging.
As the body ages, muscles lose mass, strength and quality. The process is called sarcopenia and it begins around your 40's
Alongside this, the nervous system undergoes atrophy, where the nerves everywhere in the body function less efficiently and the nerve numbers decrease.
It is thought that you lose 0.1% of you neurons (nerve cells) each year between the ages of 20 and 60, with the loss speeding up after that.
If you live to 90, your brain will have lost 150 g of tissue compared with its weight at age 50.
Studies have shown that your walking speed at age 45 is a strong predictor of your physical and mental health later in life. And there is a noticeable decking in walking speed by the time you pass 60.
The decline in speed and smoothness of you walk can be an early indicator of neurodegenerative conditions such and Parkinson's Disease. Parkinson's interferes with the brain's messages to the musculoskeletal system, causing the person's gait to be slower, less symmetrical and more staggering. This can be subtle yet detectable during the early stages of the disease.
With cognitive decline, the stride length when walking is significantly shorter. And the time it takes for a stride to be completed increases.
The complex task of walking is also designed to stop us from tripping over our own feet. The muscles on the front of the shin are designed to pull the foot up (dorsi flexion) as it swings forward. In some people this begins to fail and they trip. This is known as "foot drop", where the foot drops down so the toes hit the ground, causing a trip hazard. Nerve damage from diabetes can cause this, as can sitting cross-legged or in certain yoga positions for extended periods.
Narrowing of the arteries
If you feel pain in your gluteal muscles and down the back of your leg, and even into your calf, while walking, and it disappears when you stop moving, you might have peripheral arterial disease. The presence and the abscence of the pain relative to moving or resting is called claudication. The happens because there is a narrowing of the arteries supplying blood to your legs. When you walk, there is an increases demand for oxygen from the muscles in the legs. As a result of the narrowing, the arterial blood flowing into the legs cannot meet the oxygen demand and the muscles become anaerobic (lack of oxygen), causing the release of lactic acid. Lactic acid causes the feeling of cramp. But when you stop moving, the muscles need minimal oxygen, so the pain disappears.
***This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
This story was originally published on Medical Xpress.