At least forty of you have walked a marathon. On Saturday mornings 40-60 full and half marathon walkers in training meet at Community Hospital as part of the training program provided by Run Wild Missoula. On April 27th Alpine Physical Therapist Angela Listug-Vap had the pleasure of meeting with them prior to their long walk to discuss Injury Prevention and Core Stability. Here is a taste of what was discussed.

In order to complete a task like walking our body has to accomplish several things. We can call these biomechanical requirements. If we are lacking some of these requirements, our amazing bodies can still get the job done and complete the task but with compensations. These compensations may lead to pain and injury.

One example of a biomechanical requirement for walking is thoracic rotation.  The body needs to be able to rotate in the middle of the trunk in both directions to help drive the next step and the swing your arms. If you stand or sit and rotate your trunk you can self assess by asking: “Am I tighter in one direction?”. To practice and gain trunk rotation you can do some simple stretches, and you  can play with not allowing trunk rotation while you swing your arms . . . and then allow yourself to rotate all the way and swing the arm all the way across your body slowly alternating directions. You can view more examples of what we discussed by clicking here to access the handout.

Alpine Physical Therapy offers free 10-minute injury consults to all RWM members and Marathon participants. So give us a call at 541-2606 if you have a question and would like a chance to bounce it off one of our knowledgable physical therapists.
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Happy Walking!

Walking is one thing. Walking and thinking is entirely another. In fact, doctors think they’ve discovered a rather simple way to early detect Alzheimer’s. That’s right. By watching you walk.

According to the new research, the way you walk can tell a lot about your cognitive function . . . slowed or altered gait, for instance. And by having you do some basic brain work while walking, such as counting backwards as you walk, it’s possible for the trained observer to pick up changes in your walking pattern. For some people that change could be easily screened to help figure out the presence and, to some extent, the severity of Alzheimer’s.

As one doctor put it, “It may be that the brain is already so compromised that it cannot coordinate its circuits to efficiently manage such “dual tasks.”

Notably, the worse the walking pattern, the worse the presence of Alzheimer’s.

For the rest of this informative article from the New York Times, click here.
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To speak with one of our  physical therapists, please call our offices at 251-2323 (south) or 541-2606 (north), or visit our website by clicking here.