Cerebral Palsy maybe/maybe not

Oh my! Are those mud prints of imposed CONCENTRIC walking? That would screw up our idea as to how the prehistoric people walked.

Back to our PVL people. So, rather than saying PVL is only able to eke out medial rotation crouch, we now say they use alternate (concentric) stair climbing gait to compensate for the missing (robbed) momentum. Robbed? By what? Spasticity in parallel. Get it? We used elastics to emulate spasticity in parallel. Once you see it, it gets so obvious. Angles become secondary. The body sheds angles for something that doesn’t need changing angles (muscle work). The goal is to make the transitions and swing phase unhampered.

When we experimentally restricted joint range sequentially (here knee joint), the normal subjects consistently found the well timed (relative to other leg) pendulum that allowed side to side energy transfer. Unfettered legs would alter posture to have symmetrical correspondence with the range of the restricted side.

Even with 60 degree ‘contracture’ the walking was robust. All (12) teen age subjects easily did the tasks. Range loss alone is not badly disabling. It can make you look funny, but it won’t keep you from doing things. Perhaps a bit sweaty. A tiny bit of this was published in CORR.