Gait Assessment
By Henrick Norremark
What Is a Gait Assessment? (And Why Most of Them Tell You Less Than You'd Think)
Your gait is simply the way your body moves when you walk — including how your feet strike the ground. If you tend to land on the outside of your foot, that's part of your gait. A "gait assessment" is supposed to be someone qualified observing that pattern and drawing real conclusions from it.
Here's what doesn't get said often enough: a lot of what passes for a gait assessment isn't much more rigorous than the old foot-measuring scales that used to sit in shoe stores — a quick glance, a single observation, done and forgotten in under a minute. That's not useless, but it's worth understanding exactly how little it actually captures before you make a shoe or insert decision based on it.
Why a Single Look Doesn't Tell You Much
Your foot isn't in one position when it moves — it's going through a continuous sequence with every step: heel strike, midstance rotation, push-off. Think of a full step as a short movie, not a single photograph. A ten-second watch on a treadmill, or a single wet footprint on a piece of cardboard, captures one frame of that movie at best. It can't show you how your foot behaves through the whole sequence, which is where the actual mechanical story is.
That's the honest limitation of the classic "wet foot test" — step on damp cardboard, look at the shape of the print. It's a real, harmless thing to try, and it can give you a rough starting point. But it's one photograph of a foot that was moving the entire time it made that print. Don't mistake it for a real assessment.
A Better DIY Clue: Check Your Shoe Wear
Here's a genuinely more informative at-home check: look at the outsole of a pair of shoes you've put real miles on. If the wear is concentrated heavily on the outer edge, that's a real signal worth paying attention to — not a single frame, but the accumulated record of thousands of actual steps. It's still not a substitute for real measurement, but it's a far better proxy than a single footprint, because it reflects the movie, not a snapshot.
Where a Real Assessment Actually Happens
Video-based gait analysis — the kind that records and slows down your stride from multiple angles, or true 3D motion capture — is a different category entirely. That's an actual movie, reviewed frame by frame, not a glance. Physical therapists and podiatrists with the right equipment can do this properly; a lot of retail-level "free gait assessments" can't, no matter how well-intentioned the person doing them is.
Why "Support" Can't Actually Do Anything Here
This is worth asking directly: how does a piece of passive foam "support" a foot that's dynamically rotating through a step? It can't — not in any active sense. A static pad just sits under your arch while the actual rotation happens around it; it has no way to participate in the movement itself. It's built for a photograph, not a movie.
Landing Gear works differently because it's shaped, not padded — an asymmetric heel cup built to match the actual diagonal path your heel rotates through, engaging with your own bodyweight as you move through each step rather than just sitting passively underneath it. In independent 3D motion capture testing (BioMechanica LLC, Dr. Martyn Shorten, 2019, n=31) — real frame-by-frame measurement, not a glance — 28 of 31 people landed with their heel rotating correctly in Landing Gear's M-100, compared to just 3 of 31 in standard foam.
The Bottom Line
A wet footprint or a quick in-store glance can be a reasonable starting point for curiosity, nothing more. Checking your own worn-out shoes tells you more. And if you're making a real decision about footwear or an insert, the question worth asking isn't "what did a ten-second look tell me" — it's "what's actually shaped to interact with my foot through the whole step, not just sit underneath one moment of it."