» Swinging your arms makes walking more efficient
From the Independent:
The mystery of why people swing their arms while walking rather than holding them still and rigid like the famous silly walk of John Cleese in his Monty Python sketch appears to have been solved. An experiment involving making a group of volunteers take equally silly walks in a laboratory setting has confirmed that arm swinging makes walking more efficient and easier.
Although it may seem obvious why people swing each of their arms in opposition to their legs, scientists have puzzled over the practice for many decades because it seemed to serve no mechanical function given that the arms do not touch the ground.
One extreme theory even proposed that arm swinging while walking was hard-wired into the human nervous system and served no modern purpose because it was a vestigial relic left over from when our animal ancestors walked on all fours.
However, a study based on the movements of 10 volunteers who were asked to perform a series of unnatural walks under experimental conditions has shown that swinging the arms in opposition to the legs significantly increases the efficiency of walking.
July 29, 2009, 9:15am Comments
