The Rhythm of Walking

How rhythm redefined the way I walk

“To be a ninja, first learn to move like a ninja.”

I was informally learning martial arts from a much older friend and those were the words he said to get a 9-year old excited about training. Like most of my other friends, the word ninja brought a glint to my eye. He knew that.

In order to teach me how to move well, he asked only one thing of me: listen to the sound I was making. I followed his example and copied the movements he was showing me with one important difference: I was landing on the ground with the thud of an awkward elephant. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t do it silently like him.

Continuing my sessions with him, I began to understand how to control my motion and how to deaden the impact by moving correctly. My only guide was sound. If I made too much sound, then I would try to figure out what caused it and modify my movements to correct it. Within a few months, not only was I moving silently, but my movements were smooth and relaxed.

After moving out of Rajasthan, the memory of those sessions faded from my memory and I was back to being the clunky mover of the past.

My lack of awareness of movement even caused a ligament tear in my knee when I was just 13. I had no idea how to move so I ended up hurting myself now and then. It got worse with time, and even after a ligament reconstruction surgery, I was having back pain from incorrect movement patterns.

Running would cause problems so I began to walk regularly. This was gentle exercise for my back and did me a lot of good, without straining my knees.

Over the course of many days, I noticed that I was walking all wrong. I had been known to have a funny camel-like walk for many years, but even with that corrected, I was still moving with strain.

So I did what I hadn’t done in so many years. I listened to the sound of myself walking.

The first day, I couldn’t observe much from the sound alone. In the next two days though, I began to hear irregularities.

Walking is all about rhythm. If you make the right sounds with even rhythm, you can know just by listening whether you’re walking well.

The first thing I noticed was the difference in sound between my left and right foot. My left knee was the one that had been injured in my childhood, so I seemed to have developed a bias towards the right foot. The sound from my left foot was much weaker. Without trying to overdo it, I tried to make both sounds evenly loud. It took me a day or two, but when I could finally do it, I felt like I standing straighter and evenly on the hips. It felt easier too. I wondered how I could have put myself through so much strain and not done anything about it all those years.

This was a good sign of improvement but it was not the major breakthrough. There were more things I would soon discover.

While I had made the sound of both feet even, there was one more irregularity that I now observed. Ideally, I should have been walking with an even, straight 2-beat rhythm: TaKaTaKaTaKaTaKa and so on. What I was instead doing was spending far less time on the left step than the right. My rhythm was close to a 5-beat rhythm: Ta-Dheem---TaDheem---TaDheem--- (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 3). I was spending too much time on my right in comparison to my left. Correcting the evenness of sound wasn’t enough; I needed to get the timing right too.

This took me some more time to correct than the sound. Slowly, and with careful listening, I was on a 2-beat rhythm in a week or so. It wasn’t easy. I had become so used to the earlier rhythm that walking like this seemed unnatural. When I felt like this, I just focused on the sound and continued safe in the knowledge that it sounded alright.

I had read about how people develop their own unique tempo for walking and stick to it even when increasing or decreasing speed. Walking tempo is essentially the speed of your footsteps. If you take 2 steps every second, you’re walking at 120 beats per minute (bpm).

Keeping the tempo constant while changing speed was very counterintuitive to me. I had always thought that if I wanted to walk or run faster, all I needed to do was increase the pace of my steps and I’d be faster. It turns out this doesn’t work too well in practice.

There are two things that determine your speed. One is the length of one step that you take and the other is the rate at which you take steps — step length and tempo. If you increase tempo too much your step length will decrease correspondingly. The easier thing to do is to try to increase your step length at any given tempo. If you cover more distance in every step you take, you’ll naturally be faster.

The way to increase step length, though, is not to just over-exert your muscles and stretch as far as you can to add an inch to your step. I tried this. I can tell you it leads to injury.

Wanting to increase my speed, I tried to improve my flexibility so that my step length would increase by way of being able to extend my leg more. That works to an extent. When I listened to the results though, I found that I was overdoing it and my tempo had decreased. I made up my mind to listen to my tempo at all times. Now that I had evened out the sound and timing of both feet, I just needed to maintain the rhythm at a constant tempo.

This focus on tempo forced me to find other ways to increase speed. What I experienced, which I had already read about good movement patterns, was that I had to shift my body weight and use gravity to my advantage to move better. What I needed to do was lean. If I leaned forward, from the ankles, I would start to fall and to prevent that fall, I would need to put one leg in front of me. If while doing that I maintained the same forward lean, I would need to put the other leg in front to stop myself from falling. And we all know what putting one leg in front of the other repeatedly does — it moves us forward.

Walking or running became a process of constantly stopping myself from falling. It sounds slightly silly to me even now while I write it, but it is the easiest way I know, and it works. Listening to my tempo and maintaining it constantly had allowed me to use my body in a better way. If I wanted more speed, I would lean more. If I wanted to reduce speed, I would hold myself with less lean.

It was still not over though. I was still listening to my footsteps as I walked. I was keeping my tempo relatively unchanged. And I was leaning according to how fast I wanted to go. I noticed another problem with my movement even with all this in place. I was making a double sound with each foot. I wouldn’t have minded that double sound if both were very close apart in time, but the Ta and Thom of the TaThom-TaThom-TaThom- of each foot were very distinctly audible. This meant that I was not leaning properly. My heel was striking the ground first, even if I tried to run, and the toes came afterward. This meant I was braking with each step, by pushing with the heel to stop myself. And yet I was trying to move forward.

I had to correct this. I observed the visual and aural feedback I got from watching professional runners and I noticed that there was just one sound and it came from one distinct landing on the foot. Their heels never struck first. They would be reducing their own speed if their heels were the first to come in contact with the ground.

I listened once again and with a lot of practice I changed my step to be more even, so that I was preventing a fall with each step while maintaining my speed. Now the sound more closely resembled the ideal TaKaTaKa that I was going for.

As a side benefit, my tendency to put more weight on the inner sides of my feet also reduced because I was constantly thinking about evening out the impact across the whole foot.

Through all these changes that I made to make my walking better, my primary source of information was sound. Sound is my teacher and my guide. All corrections I made were motivated by what I heard. The more I’m able to listen, the more things I should be able to discover about myself.

The more I listened to the sound of myself walking, I more I understood rhythm itself. Both the skills of movement and rhythm were reinforcing each other. In fact, when I now need to teach rhythm to someone, I can teach it best through the medium of walking. Whether it’s subdivisions, polyrhythms, moras or korvais (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 4), movement is the language of rhythm (or is it the other way?).

I still haven’t perfected my movement and awareness to the extent that I’d like. I’m sure there are more things I need to correct. Plus, the things I’ve discovered so far need to be improved a lot more. My back pain has dropped to almost zero though. The sedentary life following my knee injury coupled with sitting around in an office, wrecked my awareness of movement, but as always, sound and music came to my rescue, and here I am, able to move much better and feel much better, and all in good rhythm.

_/\_

Around Sound turns my personal experiences with music, both as a musician and as a listener, into stories.

Improve your sense of rhythm (How I improved my sense of rhythm: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) as you read about my journey through the world of rhythm. How’s that for combining a lesson and a story into one? :D

Get a better grasp on notes with my 3-part How I learned to speak with notes series: Melody, Harmony and Connection

You might even find these interesting:
The Sound of Water, The Mirror in the Music and The Voice of a Story

You can have a look at all my articles here: Anirudh Venkatesh