A movement analysis platform: an instrumented treadmill, a motion capture array, and the live skeletal reconstruction of the walker's lower limbs. This is the class of setup that produces the ankle measurements this study reports.
Sophie JeanninWikimedia Commons (Laboratoire de Biomecanique et Mecanique des Chocs, PAMSante platform)CC BY 4.0
Illustrative. This is a different movement analysis laboratory, not the Flinders University and University of Canberra setup used in this study, and the person walking is not a study participant. It is here because it shows how gait mechanics of this kind are actually measured.
Your Ankles, Not Your Legs, Are Why Walking Gets Harder With Age
I have read a lot of research about why people slow down with age, and nearly all of it points at the big obvious things. Muscle mass. Heart and lung fitness. Joints wearing out. A new Australian study went looking somewhere much smaller and found something I did not expect: the reason walking gets harder may start at your ankles, and it may not be weakness at all.
- Researchers at Flinders University and the University of Canberra measured how 107 healthy adults aged 26 to 86 actually walk, and traced age related slowing to a specific pattern at the ankle.
- With age, people increasingly fire opposing muscles around the ankle at the same time. That stiffens the joint, which helps with stability on landing but stops the ankle behaving like a spring.
- Three things moved together across the 60 year age range: more simultaneous firing of opposing muscles, less power generated at push off, and shorter, slower strides.
- It is cross sectional and it tests no intervention, so the balance and coordination training the authors point toward is inference from the mechanism rather than a trial result.
- 107
- Healthy adults measured
- 26 to 86
- Age range, a 60 year span
- 1
- Point in time. Cross sectional, so different people rather than the same people followed
- 0
- Interventions tested. Every training suggestion here is inference from the mechanism
What the researchers actually measured
A team at Flinders University and the University of Canberra recruited 107 healthy adults spanning a 60 year age range, from 26 to 86, and measured how they walked. Not just speed and stride length, but what the muscles around the ankle were doing through the whole gait cycle. The thing that separated the older walkers from the younger ones was not a weaker calf. It was timing. With age, people increasingly fired opposing muscle pairs around the ankle at the same time, a pattern researchers call co contraction.
Three things moved together across that age span. Simultaneous firing of opposing muscles went up. The power generated at push off went down. Stride length shortened and walking speed dropped. The work was published in the journal Gait and Posture in 2026.
Stability first, efficiency second.
Why a stiffer ankle costs you distance
The mechanical logic here is refreshingly direct. When two opposing muscles pull across a joint at once, the joint gets stiff. A stiff ankle is genuinely good for one thing: it resists being knocked around in the instant your foot hits the ground. You are less likely to roll it, less likely to lose your balance.
But an ankle held rigid by opposing muscles cannot do the other half of its job. A healthy ankle behaves like a spring. It loads on contact and returns that energy into the next step. Hold it rigid and the spring stops storing anything, so the muscles have to supply the push instead. You end up paying more effort per step and getting less distance out of it, which is why the strides get shorter, the pace drops, and the walk gets tiring sooner than it used to.
The authors read this as the nervous system making a trade rather than failing. Stability first, efficiency second. They describe it as a safety first strategy.
The part that makes this trainable
This is where I want to be careful, because it is the part most likely to get overstated. The study measured mechanics. It did not test a training programme, and it did not follow anyone over time.
What it does give you is a target. If the problem were simply that calves get weak with age, the answer would be heavier calf raises. But this is not a strength problem. It is a coordination problem, a question of which muscles fire and when. That points at a different kind of work: balance, coordination, and the small stabilising muscles of the lower leg, rather than gross strength alone. The authors name that direction themselves, and it happens to be the least glamorous corner of almost everybody's training plan.
Honest caveat
This is cross sectional, not longitudinal. It compares people of different ages at a single point in time, so it shows an association between age and this firing pattern, not that any individual's gait travels along that path. The safety first framing is the authors' interpretation of measured mechanics, not a directly demonstrated neural mechanism. Most importantly, the study tests no intervention at all, so every exercise suggestion that follows is inference from the mechanism rather than a trial result. Participants were healthy adults, so this does not describe clinical gait disorders.
What this means for you
If you have noticed that walking takes more out of you than it used to, this gives you somewhere specific to look, and it is not where most people look first.
The work that matches this mechanism is small, unglamorous and cheap. Single leg stands, done while you brush your teeth. Calf raises, and the tibialis work on the front of the shin that almost nobody bothers with. Walking on uneven ground rather than only on pavement and treadmills. Tai chi, which turns up repeatedly in this literature as the kind of practice that trains exactly this sort of sequencing.
I want to be straight with you about the status of that list. It follows from the mechanism this study measured. It is not what this study tested. Treat it as a reasonable bet with a real rationale behind it rather than a proven protocol. The upside is that none of it costs anything, and none of it carries a downside worth worrying about.
Primary sources
- Lindsay, Radcliffe & Immink. Ageing alters ankle mechanics and muscle co-contraction patterns across the gait cycle. Gait & Posture 2026; 128: 110202. DOI 10.1016/j.gaitpost.2026.110202 Read the paper
- Flinders University, media summary via ScienceDaily, August 16, 2026. sciencedaily.com
Common questions
Does this mean I should stop doing calf raises?
No. Lower leg strength still matters, and the researchers include it in what they point toward. The finding is that strength alone does not address the pattern they measured. Opposing muscles firing together is about which muscles activate and when, so balance and coordination work sits alongside strength rather than replacing it.
At what age does this start?
The study cannot answer that precisely. It measured 107 people aged 26 to 86 at one point in time and found the pattern rising with age across that range, rather than switching on at a particular birthday. Because it compares different people rather than following the same people over decades, it cannot tell you when any individual begins to change.
Is a stiffer ankle actually a bad thing?
Not on its own. The stiffness improves stability at the moment your foot lands, which is genuinely useful, especially if falling is a concern. The cost is efficiency, because a rigid joint cannot store and return energy the way a springy one does. The researchers describe it as a trade the nervous system is making, not a malfunction.
Stay Curious.
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