Don't Walk "The Walk"

I went to graduate school in theater, where I first picked up an interest in the subtleties of human movement to complement my interest in sport, athleticism, and training. One of the professors in the program was a chap named Dr. Richard Nichols, a Noh theater expert and lifetime student of about a million Eastern movement forms.

One day he came strolling into our movement class and offered to "work on" one of us, eventually settling on Keegan, one of my classmates, a consummately awesome actor who was on the ectomorphic side: tall, lean, wiry.

I still keep up with Keegan a bit, so I can say that he's gotten over this tendency, but at the time, he had a habit of doing a bit of what Sam Fussell refers to in his book "Muscle" as "The Walk": a kind of exaggerated peacocky gait that entails a flaring out of the arms, a bit of forward hunching, a turning out of the feet and flaring of the legs, all of which amounts to taking up more space width-wise. It's a very modern, late-teens-early-20's "guy" way of walking. Drop by the weight room at your local college if you don't believe me.  

Anyway, Dr. Nichols worked on Keegan for maybe 20 minutes or a half-hour, scooting this and massaging that, prodding this and stretching that. At the end of the session, Keegan got off the table, looking a little dazed, and looked like he'd gone back in time about 1500 years, So upright was he gait, so free and aligned were his movements that someone remarked that he looked like he belonged on the Savannah circa 500 AD. It was an extraordinary transformation.

I remembered that remarkable afternoon this morning when I was at the gym and saw a number of guys doing The Walk: everything flexed and boxy, no fluidity of movement. Sure, some of them were genuinely big guys whose muscle development and inflexibility forced them to move that way. But for many guys, I realized that poor posture and movement efficiency is a kind of choice-an attempt to come off as strong and imposing, like a two-year-old who tries to walk like his Dad.

It's sort of the human-world equivalent of the peacock with the ornate, enormous tail that's so big it impedes the bird's movement. Except these guys walking The Walk don't have the tails-they just move as if they do.

This is weird and fascinating.