Biomechanical assessment
What Is A Biomechanical Assessment?
A biomechanical assessment is an excellent way to get a clear picture of how your feet's bones, muscles, ligaments, and tendons are working together - and how this affects the rest of your body. Stress-free and highly intuitive, a biomechanical assessment can give you valuable insights into your overall health and well-being.
If you're experiencing pain in your feet, ankles, knees, or lower back that keeps coming back, a biomechanical assessment can help figure out what's causing it. Based on that, you can get specific recommendations for taking care of your feet.
A biomechanical assessment, can also help you understand why your posture or gait has changed and how your lower body functions. Our experts can investigate any strength or mobility issues and recommend a tailored regime of exercises to improve the problem.
If you feel am bioechanical assessment could help you, visit our friendly clinic here in Sheffield. You can book an appointment using the button below.
Who can benefit from a biomechanical assessment?
A biomechanical assessment can help people of all ages and backgrounds. By improving posture, balance, and movement, these assessments can help people relieve pain, improve their performance in sports, recover from injuries, and prevent future injuries from occurring.
It is not uncommon for pain experienced in other parts of the body, such as the back, hip, or knee, to be caused by problems with the foot or lower legs.
For that reason, we recommend this foot assessment for anyone experiencing pain within the foot structure, lower leg or back.
During this assessment, your podiatrist will discuss with you to find out about the history of the problems you have been facing, as well as analyse your foot structure and foot function. They may also ask about your general health, medication and activity levels as this will help us form a management plan with you.
Once we have discussed your medical concerns and taken all of the necessary lower extremity measurements, we will try to diagnose what could be the cause of your foot pain and discuss possible treatment options. Treatments may include footwear advice, rehabilitation exercises, orthoses, injection therapy e.g. steroid injections and Ostenil, referral for further investigation or surgery.
What happens at a biomechanical assessment?
When undertaking a biomechanical assessment, one of our podiatrists here in Sheffield will start by assessing your foot and asking some detailed questions to find out where the pain is coming from. We will undertake some preliminary examinations of your foot, feeling it’s general movement, how it interacts with your ankle and lower legs and assessing for any abnormalities. This will be done in various positions, both weight-bearing and non-weight bearing.
We will perform an analysis of your feet while you are moving. This will give us a good idea of your natural gait and potentially help us to notice where the problem is within your feet.
Using these tests, we will analyse your general gait, pronation and supination.
What is pronation?
Pronation, put simply, is the movement of your foot as weight is shifted from the outer edge of your heel towards the inside of your forefoot. Pronation helps your feet adapt to different surfaces and contours, as well as absorb the impact you create when walking or moving.
What is supination?
Supination occurs when your foot absorbs the impact of you moving and putting your foot down. When walking, the front of your foot pushes forward, lifting your heel and shifting your weight to the front of your foot, propelling your forward. Similarly to pronation, too much or too little supination can cause problems and pain in your feet.
Treatment options following a gait analysis
For some of the most common problems that we see, the most common treatments that we offer are customised orthotics, exercise and stretching regimes and footwear advice that may be better suited to your feet and natural gait.
