I’m always on the look out for interesting bio mechanical things and that search recently lead me to a character called David Weck, who is known as the ‘Head over Foot Guy’. Of course, that’s not his only idea about biomechanics- he’s got loads of them – but this video is a good introduction to his Head over Foot idea:
(It’s unfortunate that there’s a picture of the controversial social media influencer Andrew Tate in the header image for that video, because he doesn’t feature in the video. I guess they’re just using him as an example of a good walker, but while he may be a good walker, I don’t like him or his opinions, nor do I think he’s a good example for kids to follow).
The ‘head over foot’ idea can be explained very easily – if you’re going to stand on one leg, then your head has to be directly over your foot if you want your balance to be good. You can try this now, by standing on one leg and playing with where your head balances over your foot. I think he’s right – if you move your head anywhere else but over your foot then your balance starts to go.
Weck then takes this into the idea of walking, so instead of the usual description of walking that you read, which is that it’s a series of controlled falls, if you alternately put your head over your foot as you walk then you end up with a more athletic, balanced and confident walking style with a bit of swagger. You can start off over exaggerating the swagger, then work on reigning it in and making it smaller until it’s hardly noticeable.
I like it – it takes a bit of getting used to, but the alternative of trying to keep your spine neutral and upright (as we are encouraged to do in Tai Chi) ends up with a very forced, stiff, walking pattern. The alternative walking pattern of placing your foot over your head creates a kind of infinity symbol movement around the solar plexus with an alternating pattern of one side of the body shortening and the other side extending.
The idea of being upright is talked about a lot in the Tai Chi classics. For example, the Tai Chi classics say “Stand like a perfectly balanced scale” (from the Treatise) and
“The upright body must be stable and comfortable
to be able to sustain an attack from any of the eight directions.” (from the ‘mental elucidation of the 13 postures’.)
But that doesn’t mean that you should look like a robot when you do it. Your body is a fluid collection of hard unbending bones connected by soft joints that allow for movement. It is designed to move in spirals, and the ‘head over foot’ idea promotes this spiral movement.
A lot, in fact, almost all, of the time in Tai Chi your weight is either on one foot or the other, or you are actually standing on one leg with the other leg kicking. So, I find that thinking about whether your head is over your foot as you do the Tai Chi form is actually a good idea. If it is then your balance will be better.
Think about the classic Tai Chi walk. We do this exercise called the Hero Stroll, which looks like this:
It’s worth doing this and thinking about the concept of keeping your head over your foot as you do it, then applying that to your Tai Chi form. Hopefully you’ll find your Tai Chi becomes more balanced, especially in the kicking movements. I find that this is where a lot of beginners have problems – they can’t balance on one leg. Well, here’s the solution!
The Tai Chi Notebook 
Lots to digest there. Thanks. As an aside, whenever I look at a young Mike Tyson, he seems to be almost 100% legs driven. e.g. https://www.instagram.com/p/C4GsFI-rTxF/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
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There are a lot of issues and factors here. I think your three answers are each correct depending on the questions.
Weck’s walking method, leading with the head is unusual. Is it innovative? My issue with it, when I attempted it, was that it limits the movement of the hips and stiffens the low back. I’m also not sure I’d be comfortable with it on uneven terrain. Questioning his method was the main point of my comment.
My gait description was of a “normal gait.” The parameters are pretty widely accepted, so you’d have to go back to studies that are probably not online to get good debate over variations. There’s a lot of information including videos on abnormal gait. Most of these are focused on using gait as a diagnostic tool. I don’t think Weck’s gait is abnormal, but it is pretty quirky, and I think inefficient.
For biomechanists, the focus is on centers of mass. Each body segment, forearm, thigh, torso, etc., has its own center of mass, and there is an overall center of mass (CoM). During walking, this is usually behind and just below the navel just in front of the spine. Here’s a review of biomechanics literature on normal gait. It’s interesting but long. Figure 2 shows the infinity loop of the CoM or “bow tie” as they call it.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6763727/
Biomechanists just observe. To get to more corrective discussions, you have to look at the clinical studies. We can do this is a later discussion if you want.
To your other points, (1) when one moves the other follows. When you are talking about leading, in this case, head or CoM, you are talking about neurological sequencing. It does matter, but outside of gait, there’s not a lot of literature on this. What’s there is in the clinical studies, including kinetic chain studies. However, the best teacher here may be trial and error. Try one kind of leading then another. Try each with resistance. That’s really telling. Pain, weakness, quick fatigue, even awkwardness are strikes against the method. Do what works best for you.
(2) The center of mass relocates as the body changes shape. It can be outside the body in a jack knife dive, for example. Beyond “dojo lore” about favoring stability versus mobility, when you bend your knees and hips and lower your torso, your CoM rises. Sufficient depth to put the CoM at the solar plexus is not unreasonable, but this puts CoM higher on the body for lower stances. The point being different activities take advantage of different CoMs. In my taiji tradition, LPHC is emphasized not only for CoM and movement but more so for control of incoming and outgoing forces.
(3) “Superior,” huh? I think I’ve addressed this above. For walking, normal gait, leading with the CoM keeps you well in balance adjusting to terrain, lets you walk with the whole body, is efficient, and allows parts of the body not in use relax, and I think it is well supported. For martial arts, I think it depends on what you are trying to do.
If you need more evidence, let me know. I’ll do a more extensive search, or you can yourself to see that I’m not cherry picking and find other interesting information.
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This split between moving ‘from’ the LPHC or the Solar Plexus has been the defining dilemma of my Chinese martial arts career :). One art I’ve been taught (Tai Chi) is LPHC-centric, the other (Xing Yi) is Solar Plexus-centric (so, similar to the Weck method). My Choy Li Fut doesn’t seem to have an opinion on the matter, but if I had to gamble I’d put my money on solar plexus. The answer? I don’t know…
1) One possibility is that if you move one, you are moving the other anyway, so it’s a non-issue…
2) It could be that arts that favour stability, rooting and wide stances (Tai Chi) favour LPHC and arts that favour mobility and being athletic – (basketball, running, Xing Yi, etc, ) favour solar plexus. Perhaps what you do needs to change depending on what you are doing – being very stable vs being very mobile.
3) It could be, as you say, that one method is superior to the other. At this point, I’d need to see the evidence 🙂
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I watched the first 10 min. of Wecks video. I’ll watch the rest later, but I wanted to get this comment in quickly.
I agree with about 95% of what he is saying, especially the motivations and rationale. He’s correct that the head needs to be over the foot and the torso upright in the suspension phase of walking. However, he makes a mistake by ignoring the role of the lumbo-pelvic-hip complex (LPHC) and by putting the “swagger” into the shoulders.
The infinity-symbol-shaped motion that he discussed needs to happen in the LPHC. The shoulders move in counter-timing and contra-laterally keeping your body in balance, not bobbing side to side. If you’re not used to this, it feels as if your hips are swaying dramatically side to side, but in actuality the side-to-side motion is kept to just what the body needs for balance and efficiency. The body is still not stiff or tense.
The head is suspended and spinal muscles are relaxed, not stiff at all. When you walk, you’ll get an S-wave traveling through the spine, so the spine looks like a like a string of pearls. This is essential for shock absorption and dissipation and ground reaction force transfer. When walking and running the head will hardly move side-to-side or up and down at all.
This is basically the consensus of biomechanists who study walking and running. It is also in line with what is taught in Taijiquan.
In TJQ, especially push hands, the LPHC, kua and yao, is responsible for again directing ground reaction forces, dissipating incoming forces, and preventing double-weighting. This allows the head to be suspended and the spinal muscles relaxed except as called upon for actions.
My conclusion after over a decade of study biomechanics was that the biomechanics of TJQ is perfect in every way that I could think to test.
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