Are you a Limb Flinger?

When we walk, a portion of our time is spent on one leg while we bring the other leg forward through the air, right? This act of balancing on the one leg, without falling over for that split second, is a highly complex achievement by the muscles of the inner thigh, outer thigh, foot and brain. If you’re like many of us, it’s a feature of walking that you take for granted until something hurts.

Many of us have under-conditioned hip and foot muscles.

Part of the reason is that we, in the developed world, are raised to sit in chairs at an early age in addition to wearing shoes much of the day. Both of these things (sitting and shoe wearing) impact the development of the muscles needed to walk well. One of the most common things I see with my patients who sit for a living, is underactive hip muscles. A popular scapegoat for hip and back dysfunction is the gluteus muscle group[1] otherwise know as the butt. The “glutes” are the more obvious and superficial muscles that make up the buttock region and you’re probably familiar with those, but there are many more deeper smaller muscles that control hip (ball and socket) movement and all of them need our attention. None of these muscles are necessarily weak, they are confused and just not always prioritized by our lifestyle.

Let’s see what a limb-flinger looks like when they walk. 

These are video clips from a creator named Kevin Parry on Youtube. 

In this first clip, look at how the arms and legs are dangling and appear a bit like ropes as they move forward and backward. People who do this are using the weight of their arms and legs to fling themselves forward with momentum.

Do you notice how everything pivots around the waist? Part of limb flinging puts more of a twisting stress/strain on the waist — the lower back.

Even if you’re not flinging your arms and you might think you’re intentionally placing your legs with muscular effort, if you are walking too quickly, some limb flinging has to happen.

Do you see how much twisting is happening in the low back? That’s not where the body is designed to generate walking power.

If you find a way to control the twisting, you’ll notice that the hips do more of the work they’re designed to do  — hinging forward and backward. This might ease the torque-stress on your lower back. And maybe your feet stay on the ground a bit longer with each step too.

A few posts ago (3 Questions to Ask Yourself While Walking) I said: “…the muscles creating or controlling an uncomfortable or painful movement are the muscles that need strengthening and stabilizing.”

As in many cases, the pain is where there is excessive motion and in the case of limb-flinging that will likely be in the lower back and waist (as you can see by the two video clips above).

This means, if you are a limb flinger and you have pain in the lower back while walking or maybe right after walking, your job is to find ways to strengthen and stabilize your lumbar spine.

Before you run with this and assume that you need to be better at sucking in your gut or commit to doing 100 sit ups a day, please don’t. That’s absolutely not the answer.

There are many good ways to strengthen the lower back, none of which involve sit ups or crunches. Two of my favorite tools for this are physical therapy style activities called “dead bug” and “bird dog”.

If you do an internet search you’ll surely find some good examples. Below I’ve included the links that I like to share with my patients just for starters. Depending on how it feels in their body to do either one of these, we fine-tune and modify accordingly.

Please be sure to consult your own physical medicine professional first. 

Your situation may be unique and it’s important to get that one-on-one attention to make sure your specific needs are being met.

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Next week I’ll be dedicating my post to those of you who like to use your bones as meat hangers but don’t know it yet.

Stay tuned! And in the meantime feel free to leave comments or questions about limb-flinging below…

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[1] There are three main large-group muscles that operate the buttock: Gluteus Maximus, G. Medius and G. Minimus

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[As originally published on medium.com/@yalingliou on May 20th, 2022]