ABSTRACT
Walking is an essential daily practice and constitutes 80 per cent of children’s daily physical activity (PA). Bipedal gait is a complex series of alterations inmagnitude, direction, rotation and force of the body as it coordinates within space. PA has been implicated in improved kinematic and kinetic aspects of gait (Maltais et al., 2005), however, despite a plethora of research investigating the metabolic cost of movement, few have directly investigated the relationship between PA and gait efficiency in children. The primary purpose of this study was to examine the variation in mechanical economy during free and paced on-ground walking as a function of short-duration PA in a group of healthy children.
