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Comment by SketchySeaBeast | Hacker News Reader

- toe-walking, walking on the balls of the feet

- in-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned inwards

- out-toeing, walking with one or both feet turned out.

I thought that toe walking was called out two decades ago when I was in university - I remember it being mentioned in a psych class. Otherwise, that kind of includes everyone who doesn't walk with feet straight, doesn't it?

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People should be careful with basing psychological stereotypes on gait, as there's already an extensive legacy framework of stereotypes based on gait—are these new stereotypes meaningfully different medical observations grounded in facts, or are they just more stereotypes? Literature on Native Americans, for example, often claims that they walk on the balls of the feet in distinction to "the Anglo," who walks on his heels. For example:

> Our sources say that Native Americans tended to land on the ball of the foot (a "forefoot strike"), or flat-footed ("midfoot strike"), rather than landing on the heel and rolling forward ("heel strike"). [0: 90]

> Our sources indicate that Native Americans commonly walked with toes pointed straight ahead or turned slightly inward, rather than turned outward. [0: 91]

I've pulled just one article here, but there's a huge trove of racial and ethnic gait stereotypes with all sorts of moral implications. It's important not to repeat that stereotyping when trying to address autism.

[0] Ranalli, B. 2019. "Thoreau's Indian Stride." The Concord Saunterer 27: 89-110. https://www.jstor.org/stable/45271429

Your comment doesn’t really support its own premise well - you just say that we used to stereotype people and point out what some of those stereotypes were, but not why they’re radically incorrect. You sorta just pointed out that they exist.

I’m not of one opinion or the other, I just don’t see why it’s self evident that certain groups of people wouldn’t walk a certain way.

I had a realisation recently that we’re pretty comfortable with regional dialect borders being an entrenched and normal thing that reach back in history a thousand years or more and that something as specific as how we move our mouths and tongues is strongly correlated geographically.

But we don’t often pay attention to other types of physical and behavioural culture being as geographically entrenched as they sometimes seem to be.

Accents hold some special place in being so recognisable but I think there’s no obvious reason we wouldn’t have many other layers of physical culture like this.

The signal is a bit harder to pick up but I’m sure it’s there.

I’m not trying to make any particular point for or against damaging stereotypes here.

There are some behaviours which are classically regionally identified, but they tend to be the exception to the rule...

Italians talking with their hands, the Indian head-wobble, the East-Asian squat, etc.

“A couple of the other Meltdowns are standing around smoking cigarettes, holding them between two fingers in the Slavic style, like darts.”

— Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson, 1992

So these are the really loud behaviours, and not necessarily what I was thinking of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_inattention

So there's a thing which I can't find the name of but it's something like a civil inattention sniff. It's a brief sniff at the moment someone walks past you. I'm not saying this one is cultural or geographical. It's possibly universal, I'm making a reference to the signal vs noise ratio.

If you've never noticed the civil inattention sniff, you may start noticing it now, or noticing yourself do it. I was decades on this earth before I picked up on it. It's a similar amount of signal to feeling the weather change in your knees.

A tiny signal in background noise of input of many physical senses.

I believe and suggest that it's true that there are many of these micro behaviours in many different regional cultures, but I'm not stating as fact or backing that up with science here. This is just an exploratory idea for me that I enjoy speculating on.

My understanding is that forefoot striking is common in any culture where going barefoot is typical. It doesn't feel good to slam your bare heel onto the ground all the time. It's only tolerable if you're wearing shoes.

We should really consider heel striking to be the unusual non-default behavior here, the same as how prevalence of chairs means many Westerners have shortened Achilles tendons and lost the ability to do a comfortable deep squat which has been a fundamental human posture for longer than we've been a species.

Doubt that's going to happen. "Normal" is whatever the educators believe: just like RP is the One True English, whatever WEIRD neurotypical men do is the One True Behaviour. We've been making this mistake for hundreds of years.

Tip-toeing around mechanically makes sense when one wants to be quiet.

I find walking on concrete is more comfortable when using the whole foot, so just barely tip-toeing rather than my usual heel striking. In general, it's not a good idea to walk on hard surfaces barefoot or in sandals excessively, no matter what the FiveFingers crowd might believe. I discovered plantar fasciitis the hard way [pun not intended].

> In general, it's not a good idea to walk on hard surfaces barefoot or in sandals excessively

I think cultures where going barefoot is the norm also tend to have fewer hard concrete and stone floors. We've engineered a whole alien environment for ourselves that then require augmenting our body to deal with.

Yup. We haven't had dense hair/fur for eons because we and other hominids made clothes from the skins of animals. It makes me think we'll just keep evolving ever more gracile and requiring almost armored exoskeletons to do anything.

What are the moral implications of different cultures habitually walking with a forefoot strike vs a heel strike?

You’re mistaking forefoot striking with toe walking. Having known someone that toe walks, it literally means they walk around on the balls of their feet, not just land on them first when they take a step. If you stand up, raise yourself on the the balls on your feet and then walk around without your heel ever touching the ground, that’s toe walking.

Incidentally(?) the only person I’ve ever seen do this was clearly neurodivergent.

Basically a measure of whether or not you make an effort to emulate your peers. If you naturally walk weird and don't care about fitting in, then....you're probably on the spectrum.

That's one potential explanation for gait differences. It's also possible that muscle development plays a role, or motor control, or sensory feedback, or a confluence of factors.

I'd be particularly interested in seeing if these gait differences are limited to childhood, or if they persist into adulthood. It might simply be delaying a developmental step.

IIRC, toe-walking is actually healthier and puts less strain on the foot. It's a very good way to run long distance, once the muscles are acclimated. I suspect some of us still do that naturally as children for that reason and therefore only adjust due to societal pressure.

I think you are mistaking toe-walking with landing fairly flat footed (the way most people tend to run with more minimalist barefoot style shoes)

Running purely on the balls of your feet seems like its more of a sprinting thing

It's def also a sprinting thing, but it can also be a normal running gait - it lets your leg muscles serve as shock absorbers. And if you've ever heard of the description of an athletic person as someone with a 'cat-like' walking gait, I think toe-walking is what's meant.

Anecdotally, I played football (soccer) as a kid, and multiple coaches taught me that it's better to rest with weight on balls of feet rather than heels for the benefit of being able to quickly move in any direction rather than being planted on the spot. It was just about when standing still or walking slowly, they never tried to adjust how I ran (though maybe if I'd been in a more professional level they would have), but I can imagine that sort of training might well have affected how I walk if I kept playing into adulthood.

Yeah at least a few kindergarten and elementary school teachers were watching out for toe walkers since at least around the mid-90's. Source: I know people.

The school bullies sniffed out autistic kids like pigs on truffles with this being a clear tell.

I also remember that, and asymmetric baby crawling. That was decades back.

I guess the real "news" is just that it made it into the DSM:

> Having an "odd gait" is now listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a supporting diagnostic feature of autism.

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