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Locomotion

Just skip it

Nature volume 394, pages 721–722 (1998)Cite this article

A girl and her dog are playing in the park. At first they walk slowly, side by side. As they speed up, the girl begins to run and the dog begins to trot. Finally, they break into a sprint and the dog begins to gallop. Whereas the girl uses the same running gait that she used at slower speeds, the dog has an extra gait, the gallop, that is unmatched by any normal bipedal gait. But in Proceedings of the Royal Society, Alberto Minetti1 reports that skipping — the playful gait used by young children in the school-yard — is biomechanically similar to quadrupedal galloping. In both skipping and galloping, pendulums and springs collaborate to conserve mechanical energy.

When people and animals walk and run, they use mechanical tricks to minimize how much work their muscles must do2. During walking, they vault over their strut-like limbs, conserving mechanical energy by using pendulum-like energy exchange. In the first half of the phase when a limb is in contact with the ground, the body's forward velocity slows as the body moves upward, and kinetic energy is converted into gravitational potential energy. During the second half of the contact phase for a limb, the opposite process occurs, as the body accelerates forward while moving downward. This recycling of mechanical energy reduces the work that the muscles must do by as much as 65%.

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Figure 1: Patterns for walking, skipping and running in humans.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Integrative Biology, Locomotion Laboratory, 3060 Valley Life Sciences Building, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-3140 , California, USA

    Claire T. Farley

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  1. Claire T. Farley
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Farley, C. Just skip it. Nature 394, 721–722 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/29395

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