Biomechanics

Human walking is accomplished with a strategy called the double pendulum. During
forward motion, the leg that leaves the ground swings forward from the hip. This
sweep is the first pendulum. Then the leg strikes the ground with the heel and rolls
through to the toe in a motion described as an inverted pendulum. The motion of the
two legs is coordinated so that one foot or the other is always in contact with the
ground. The process of walking recovers approximately sixty per cent of the energy
used due to pendulum dynamics and ground reaction force.[6][7]
Walking differs from a running gait in a number of ways. The most obvious is that
during walking one leg always stays on the ground while the other is swinging. In
running there is typically a ballistic phase where the runner is airborne with both feet
in the air (for bipedals).
Another difference concerns the movement of the center of mass of the body. In
walking the body 'vaults' over the leg on the ground, raising the center of mass to its
highest point as the leg passes the vertical, and dropping it to the lowest as the legs are
spread apart. Essentially kinetic energy of forward motion is constantly being traded
for a rise in potential energy. This is reversed in running where the center of mass is at
its lowest as the leg is vertical. This is because the impact of landing from the ballistic
phase is adsorbed by bending the leg and consequently storing energy in muscles and
tendons. In running there is a conversion between kinetic, potential, and elastic
energy.
There is an absolute limit on an individual's speed of walking (without special
techniques such as those employed in speed walking) due to the velocity at which the
center of mass rises or falls - if it's greater than the acceleration due to gravity the
person will become airborne as they vault over the leg on the ground. Typically
however, animals switch to a run at a lower speed than this due to energy efficiencies.

Giovanni Cavagna, an expert in the study of walking from the University of Milan
The Physics of . . . Walking
Why humans move like an imperfect pendulum
by Robert Kunzig
published online July 1, 2001

In what one can only assume is Giovanni Cavagna's funniest home video, Cavagna, a
jolly physiologist from the University of Milan, is standing in an aviator suit in the
passenger compartment of an Airbus A-300. The plane, operated by the European
Space Agency, has been cleared of its seats and filled with scientific gear. Cavagna is
grinning and holding a pendulum, which is swinging at a steady pace. Next to him, his
friend and longtime collaborator Norman Heglund is pacing steadily back and forth
on a 10-foot-long platform. The plane is cruising at 30,000 feet or so over the Bay of
Biscay, off Bordeaux, France. NASA has a similar plane called the Vomit Comet.

Abruptly, the Airbus starts to climb— so steeply that the horizon outside goes almost
vertical. Normally at this point the pilot would jam the stick forward and throttle the
engines way back, sending the plane over the top of its parabola and into a screaming
dive. For 20 seconds or so, we would see Cavagna et al. floating around the padded
compartment in zero gravity. This time, however, the pilot throttles back gravity to
only 40 percent of its terrestrial value— to around what it is on Mars. Cavagna stays
on his feet, but his pendulum starts swinging in long, slow, sloppy arcs. On the
platform Heglund is now taking long, slow, floating steps. "You feel beautiful at .4
g," Cavagna says. "Walking on Mars would be great."

Walking on Earth, Cavagna says, is a bit of a struggle— and so is trying to understand

the physics of it. Cavagna's Airbus experiments are but the latest in a long series; he
has been studying our awkward form of locomotion for nearly 40 years. Very early on
he figured out our basic strategy: To save energy, we walk like a pendulum. The
problem is we do it badly.

A pendulum is a device that transforms kinetic energy of motion into gravitational

potential energy and back. As it moves through the bottom of its arc, the pendulum's
velocity and thus its kinetic energy— mass times velocity squared divided by two, or
mv 2/2— reach a maximum. At the top of its arc, the pendulum slows to a stop, but at
that point the potential energy— mass times gravity times height— is at its peak. As
the pendulum falls back down, potential energy is converted back to kinetic energy. In
a good pendulum the conversion is close to 100 percent, with only a bit of energy lost
to the friction of moving through the air and that of the bearing from which it is hung.
One nudge, and a pendulum keeps swinging a long time.

With each step you walk, you yourself become an inverted pendulum: You pivot
around the foot that's on the ground, as if you were using that leg to pole-vault, and
your center of mass, somewhere in the belly, describes an arc. As you plant a foot on
the ground in front of you, the ground exerts a force back up your leg that slows you
down, and you continue slowing as you rise up on that foot to the top of your arc. At
that point your kinetic energy is at a minimum— but your potential energy is at a
maximum. As you fall forward into the next step, that stored potential energy is
converted back into kinetic energy, and you accelerate again.

"If the body were a perfect pendulum— if it could convert the kinetic energy into
potential energy and back without wasting a calorie— walking would be nearly
effortless," says Heglund, a physiologist at the University of Louvain in Belgium.
"But you're only 65 percent of a perfect pendulum." In other words, 35 percent of the
energy for each step has to be supplied afresh from the food you burn. Fish and birds
do better: They burn less energy per unit distance than we do, even though birds are
fighting gravity all the time, and fish have to fight their way through a dense liquid.
"So why are we sweating? Where's the work?" asks Cavagna. "It's work we're doing
against ourselves. It's a lack of coordination."

Somewhere in our legs, muscles are pulling against one another, wasting energy as
heat. Even after four decades Cavagna is not sure where the waste happens— but he
does know at what point in the stride. The tip-off came from some experiments that
he, Heglund, and Heglund's Louvain colleague Patrick Willems did with women from
Kenya.

Women of the Kikuyu and Luo tribes have a remarkable ability: They can carry on
their head a basket of produce that weighs as much as 70 percent of their body.
Heglund tried to match the feat, wearing a bicycle helmet filled with lead shot; he
only got up to 15 percent of his body weight. "When that much weight gets out of
balance, it feels like it's going to rip your head off," he explains.

The African women's most surprising prowess, though, is that they can carry as much
as 20 percent of their weight with no extra effort— that is, without using more oxygen
and burning more calories than when they carry nothing. Puzzled, the researchers had
the women walk on a platform that records the forces exerted by the feet, and thus the
kinetic and potential energy at each point of the stride.

There is one point, Cavagna's team found, at which load-bearing Kenyan women do
far better than the rest of us. As we move through the top of one stride and start to fall
into the next one, most of us pause imperceptibly for a few milliseconds: We're falling
and losing potential energy, but we're not yet converting it to increased speed, because
muscles in our leg are contracting and fighting the fall. The Kenyan women do the
same thing when they're not carrying a load. But put a heavy weight on their head,
and somehow they are able to shorten or even eliminate this pause— and thus to
convert more of their potential energy into forward motion rather than muscle heat.
With no visible change in their gait, their conversion rate rises from 65 percent to as
much as 80 percent. In other words, they become better pendulums. Unfortunately,
they have no idea how they do it.

For most people, the optimum walking speed— the speed at which our kinetic energy
is in balance with our potential energy— is around 3 miles per hour. But short legs
slow a walker down, and so does low gravity. On Mars, at .4g, you would glide along,
lifting your legs more easily than you do on Earth and thus exerting less at any given
speed. But you wouldn't be able to walk as fast because you would be falling much
more slowly into each new step. On the moon, at around .17 g, in order for your
kinetic energy to balance your minuscule potential energy, you would have to walk so
slowly that you would hardly move forward at all. In 1969, when Neil Armstrong and
Buzz Aldrin took their giant leaps for mankind, Cavagna wasn't at all surprised to see
them bouncing (a kind of running) rather than walking. He had predicted as much in
1964.

The Airbus results teach one potentially useful lesson, Cavagna says: For a manned
mission to Mars, spacecraft designers might consider pegging their artificial gravity
not at 1 g but at the agreeable .4 g of their destination. Certainly they shouldn't choose
1.5 g's, which the Airbus pilot re-created for Cavagna's group by flying steeply
banked circles. You walk faster in 1.5 g's, but you feel, well, surprisingly heavy. "You
pick up your foot and start to fall forward, and you think you're going to fall on your
nose," Heglund says. The video shows Cavagna jerking along like Charlie Chaplin
and looking none too stable.

The next time Cavagna rides the Airbus, he plans to take 1.5 g's at a run; it will be like
running with a backpack loaded with half his ample body weight. At age 67 and with
a bad back, he is defying doctors to forbid him. "I'm not doing this because it's
useful," Cavagna says. "I'm doing it because it's amusing."

The American Journal of Sports Medicine 8:345-350 (1980)

© 1980 SAGE Publications
Biomechanics of walking, running, and
sprinting
Roger A. Mann, M.D.
John Hagy, O.R.E.
A biomechanical study of 13 runners which consisted of 2
male sprinters, 5 experienced joggers, and 6 elite long-
distance runners were studied. We obtained hip, knee, and
ankle joints motions in the sagittal plane and
electromyographic data from specific muscle groups.
As the speed of gait increased, the length of stance phase
progressively decreased from 62% for walking to 31% for
running and to 22% for sprinting. The sagittal plane motion
increased as the speed of gait increased. Generally
speaking, the body lowers its center of gravity with the
increased speed by increasing flexion of the hips and knees
and magnifying dorsiflexion at the ankle joint.
Electromyographic activity about the knee demonstrated
increased activity in the quadricep muscle group and
hamstring group with increased speed. Mus cle function
about the ankle joint demonstrated that the pos terior calf
musculature which normally functions during the midstance
phase in walking became a late swing phase muscle and was
active through the first 80% of stance phase, as compared to
15% in walking.
Beside the changes in the electromyographic activity of the
muscles, the anterior compartment muscles of the calf
undergo a concentric contracture at the time of initial floor
contact during running and sprinting but undergo an
eccentric contrac tion during walking.
http://www.seatingandmobility.ca/ISS2002/ToSunnyHill2/iss2002html/016_SITTIN
GBIOMECHANICS.htm

SITTING BIOMECHANICS I: BACK TO BASICS

Patrick Meeker, MS PT

WHAT IS BIOMECHANICS?
The science concerned with the action of forces, internal or external, on the living
body (1)

ANATOMY 101
The human vertebral column consists of 24 separate (presacral) vertebrae and two
composite vertebrae, the sacrum (5 pieces) and coccyx (4 pieces) for a total of 33
segments.

FUNCTIONS OF THE SPINE

The spine serves many functions: stable base for head and internal organs;
attachments for ligaments, tendons, rib cage and pelvis; links upper and lower
extremities; provides trunk mobility; and protects the spinal cord. (2)

DEVELOPMENT OF NORMAL CURVES: PRIMARY

Thoracic and sacral kyphosis develops in utero and are present in the newborn.

DEVELOPMENT OF NORMAL CURVES: SECONDARY

The secondary curves of the spine develop with cervical lordosis, generally at 6-8
months, by means of prone head righting and turning. Lumbar lordosis develops next,
at 11-14 months, as a result of weight bearing from standing and walking.

NORMAL CONTOURS OF THE ADULT SPINE IN STANDING

The normal contours of the standing adult are 7 cervical vertebrae in lordosis, 12
thoracic vertebrae in kyphosis, 5 lumbar vertebrae in lordosis and 9 fused sacral-
coccygeal segments in kyphosis.

ARTICULATIONS OF THE SPINE

Generally there are six articulations between each adjacent vertebra: the superior body
with the disc above; the inferior body with the disc below; two superior facets
articulating with the inferior facets of the rostral vertebra; and two inferior facets
articulating with superior facets of the caudal vertebra.

VARIATIONS IN VERTEBRAL ARTICULATIONS

The cervical region differs primarily in the first two segments. The occipital-atlanto
complex has no disc, among other differences, and the atlanto-axial (C1-C2) complex
also lacks a disc, but has a superior protrusion called the dens, or odontoid process.
The thoracic region has rib and sternum articulations from T1-T9 and rib only
articulations at T10-T12. The sacrum and coccyx are fused, and the sacrum articulates
with the ilium at S1-S3.

REGIONAL VERTEBRAL DIFFERENCES

The cervical region has a large vertebral foramen, foramen transversarium for
vertebral arteries, and a small, narrow body that ends inferiorly in a concave shape
and short, slender spinous processes. The thoracic region has long, overlapping
spinous processes, and articulations for ribs. The lumbar region features large
diameter bodies with increased height, broad, thick, hatchet-shaped spinous processes,
and horizontal transverse processes.

MOBILITY OF THE SPINE IS INFLUENCED BY:

Orientation of the facet joints, structure of the vertebra, disc size and fluid content,
ligamentous and bony articulations and muscular attachments.

PREDOMINANT MOVEMENTS BY REGION

The cervical spine features two distinct movements: OA provides 10-30° flexion-
extension (head nodding) and AA (C1-2) provides about 90° rotation. The thoracic
spine is primarily rotation and is limited by the rib cage. The lumbar spine offers
flexion and extension, but is the most stable are due to weight bearing. (2)

SPINAL MOTIONS
The basic motions of the spine are flexion, extension, lateral flexion and rotation.
These motions rarely occur in isolation. Most often they occur as "coupled motions."
The amount of motion that occurs at most joints, however, is quite small.

MOBILITY-STABILITY PARADOX
Increasing mobility generally leads to less stability, and vice-versa, increasing
stability generally leads to decreased mobility.

THE SEATED PERSON

How does this information apply biomechanically to the human body?

POSTURAL CONTROL MECHANISMS

Postural control for stability involves integration of sensory inputs from the visual,
vestibular, and somatosensory along with modulation of motor function from the
cerebral cortex down to the reflex arc level.

MOTION AND TRUNK CONTROL

Through these mechanisms, the seated individual’s trunk control is modulated by
muscle recruitment that is direction-specific (to the perturbation) and demonstrates a
caudal-to-cranial order. (3)

HEAD CONTROL AND THE CERVICAL SPINE

The center of gravity of the head is just anterior and superior to the external auditory
meatus and behind the sella turcica. (4) This point, positioned above the anterior
surface of the shoulder, demonstrates an average normal posture as opposed to an
ideal posture. Anterior head translation is one of the most common postural faults.
(4,5).

SITTING BIOMECHANICS AND CEREBRAL PALSY- AN EXAMPLE

In a study of 10 children with spastic diplegia, dysfunction presented during
modulation of forward perturbations resulted in activation of all ventral muscles,
cranial-caudal recruitment and excessive antagonistic co-activation. (5)
DETRIMENTAL EFFECTS OF THE SEATED POSITION
The seated position is one of the primary risk factors for low back pain. Studies
indicate the position of the seating surface can prevent or reduce the onset of LBP. (6-
13)

SPINAL LOADING IN THE SEATED POSITION

Early research indicated higher intradiscal pressures for sitting than standing. More
recent research contradicts these findings. (10,13) Static loading of the lumbar spine is
decreased by adopting multiple sitting postures. This allows for greater ROM of the
lumbar segments and increases joint nutrition. (4,8-11,13-17)

CRITICAL LOADS
In vitro studies indicate the critical load (Pcr= inherent passive stability of the
osteoligamentous spine) of the thoracolumbar spine is 20N* and the cervical spine
10.5N. This is represented as the stiffness of the column and is represented
mathematically by a bending moment. (14) The average Pcr of the lumbar spine is 8.6
times that of the average cervical spine (14,18)

MUSCULAR STABILITY OF THE LUMBAR SPINE

Dorsal muscle activity (esp. longissimus and iliocostalis of the lumbar extensors) is
important for stability in a seated position, but is compromised with full forward
flexion of the lumbar spine. Many other muscles (paraspinals including multifidi,
quadratus lumborum, psoas and abdominal wall muscles) have force vectors that are
less affected by lumbar flexion. (19)

LUMBAR LORDOSIS AND LUMBAR SUPPORTS: RESEARCH

Trunk muscle EMG studies show decreased activation with the use of lumbar
supports and seat back inclination (13), while studies of office chairs showed that
sagittal curvature of the lumbar spine was clearly affected by the seat tilt, backrest
recline, backrest profile and seat-back angle. (7)

LUMBAR LORDOSIS AND LUMBAR SUPPORTS: REAL LIFE

Numerous studies have indicated the decrease in lumbar lordosis from standing to
sitting. (4,7-9,12,20) Without appropriate placement and size, a lumbar support may
inadvertently displace the pelvis and create a posteriorly rotated pelvis. Lumbar
support for comfort, control of pelvis rotation at PSIS is in order.

SPINAL SHRINKAGE AND SEATING

Working in a seated position for 6.5h, shrinkage occurred in the thoracic spine, with
virtually no change in lumbar pre-test height. When compared to standing work, the
shrinkage is greater in the lumbar spine and equal in the thoracic spine. (9)

COMFORT: AN ILLUSIVE AND UBIQUITOUS TERM

Comfort is usually defined in seating research as discomfort, the presence of a
distracting bodily sensation, (20) or biomechanical stress acting on the body. (12)

ASSESSMENT AND PREDICTION OF SITTING COMFORT

Comfort (or more often, discomfort) is most often measured subjectively by the user
and correlated to an objective measurement device. This is taken as a static
measurement, or more precisely, a non-continuous measurement. Sitting, however, is
a dynamic activity. (20)

IN-CHAIR MOVEMENT
Because sitting is a dynamic activity, comfort or discomfort may be more accurately
measured by continuous monitoring of in-chair movement. This has been shown to
correlate linearly with discomfort as seated time progresses. Changes in the center of
pressure can be measured over time, and independent of task, can be a reliable
indicator of sitting discomfort. (20)

PRESSURE MAPPING
Pressure mapping as a clinical tool can provide: client and caregiver education;
selection and comparison of support surfaces; assessment of changes in position or
equipment (21); objective, quantitative outcome measurement; and research data
collection.

RESEARCH ON COMFORT
A preponderance of the published research on seating comfort has been performed in
the occupational and transportation settings. Findings can be useful when applied to
80% of wheelchair users, but may be more difficult with the complex seated user, as
pure comfort may be combined with functional needs.