How people maintain balance while walking

How people maintain balance while walking

FPJ BureauUpdated: Saturday, June 01, 2019, 08:17 AM IST
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New York : People do not always watch their steps and yet most of the time they do not fall. Researchers have now found out how people maintain the balancing act, reports IANS.

Each step can be thought of as a small move intended to help people recover stability after a very tiny fall – a microcosm of the larger, more dramatic moves we employ to stay vertical when something knocks us off balance, the findings showed.

“Our bodies initiate an almost imperceptible fall to the right before taking a step to the right, and a fall to the left before taking a step to the left,” the study noted.

If our pelvis happens to move a millimetre differently one way or the other in a particular step, it creates a tiny imbalance, which we seem to compensate for by placing the next step in an appropriate position.

This all happens without conscious thought on our part, the researchers found. “Every step we take is a balancing act as the body falls forward and sideways,” explained Manoj Srinivasan, an assistant professor at the Ohio State University in the US.

“We were able to show that the next foot position can be predicted way in advance of when the foot is placed – as early as the middle of the previous step,” he added.

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