While a repetitive gait cycle arises from the alternat­ing base of support found in all bipeds, the existence of this cycle provides great opportunity for clinical and biomechanical analysis of a child with gait dysfunc­tion.

In particular, a repetitive cycle lends itself to nat­ural subdivision, which in turn, leads to a sequence of events that must be performed in order and with the correct timing for efficient walking to occur.

The earlier section titled “Normal Gait Is Cyclical and Symmetric” discussed temporal subdivisions of the gait cycle delin­eated by foot/floor contact and their use in comparing limb symmetry, measuring outcomes, and the general characterization of overall gait performance. The focus of the current section is to describe another type of gait cycle deconstruction, one based on functional subdivi­sions. For this approach, the functional prerequisites of walking are identified, and this provides a framework for subdividing the gait cycle into functional divisions (24). It is then possible to use the measurements avail­able from IGA to identify quantitative differences at each joint and the specific functional abnormalities that occur at critical moments in the gait cycle (25,26).

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