Typically, walking requires little conscious thought. Each step happens almost automatically, making it easy to overlook how much coordination is involved. It is only when that ease begins to fade that the complexity behind each step becomes apparent.
As people age, the body appears to make a gradual trade-off, prioritizing stability with each step, even if doing so makes walking slower, less efficient and more tiring.
Researchers at Flinders University and the University of Canberra examined movement data from 107 healthy adults ages 26 to 86 to better understand how walking changes across adulthood. The team focused on the ankle, which plays a central role in both maintaining balance and generating the force needed to move the body forward. By analyzing muscle activity, ankle movement and the forces produced during each step, researchers were able to observe how aging gradually shifts the balance between stability and propulsion.
One of the clearest age-related changes appeared in how opposing muscles around the ankle worked together.
During portions of each step when stability is especially important, these muscles increasingly worked at the same time as age increased, a pattern known as co-contraction. This pattern is associated with greater ankle stability by limiting excessive movement at the joint.
“As we get older, the body starts to favor stability over efficiency,” lead author Cody Lindsay said. “That helps keep us upright, but it also makes walking more of an effort.”
That greater emphasis on stability did not necessarily translate into more effective movement. During parts of the walking cycle, researchers observed increased muscle activity patterns even as the mechanical force produced by the ankle declined or remained unchanged.
Forward propulsion also decreased with age, showing that the body may become less efficient at turning muscular effort into movement.
These changes help explain some of the more visible effects of aging on walking, including shorter strides, slower speeds and greater fatigue over long distances.
The pattern also reflects broader changes in how the body controls movement. As sensory feedback and muscle-tendon function decline with age, maintaining stability may require greater reliance on compensatory strategies around the ankle. These changes can also make it more difficult to recover from trips or slips, contributing to fall risk and potentially affecting confidence and independence over time.
The findings suggest that attaining mobility may require more than preserving muscle strength alone. Researchers pointed to regular physical activity, lower-leg strengthening, balance exercises such as tai chi and activities that challenge coordination. Further approaches may also need to consider how muscles are timed and coordinated throughout each step, rather than focusing only on the amount of force they can produce.
While the findings point to possible ways of preserving mobility, the researchers caution that the study does not show these exercises can reverse the age-related changes they observed.
The research was a secondary analysis of existing movement data, and walking speed was not included as a separate factor in the analysis. Researchers also noted that the muscle activity measurements used in the study provide only indirect evidence of changes in joint stiffness.
Longer-term and intervention studies will be needed to determine whether improving balance, coordination and muscle-tendon function can preserve forward movement without sacrificing the stability the body increasingly relies on with age.
