View Full Version : Why do we swing our arms when we walk?
Wasteland
07-31-09, 11:17 am
Why wouldn't we just keep our arms still to conserve energy? Watchmen, bear with me. This thread does have a point to make, lol.
InkdMuscle
07-31-09, 3:04 pm
Why wouldn't we just keep our arms still to conserve energy? Watchmen, bear with me. This thread does have a point to make, lol.
Shit IDK please enlighten us bro.
Seems like this was answered pretty well here:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071111134641AAsPuk9
Iron4Life
07-31-09, 3:45 pm
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090728/sc_afp/sciencearmsoffbeat
Wasteland
07-31-09, 3:54 pm
The question is, why would we evolve walking the way we do? Swinging your arms comes at a cost, energy expenditure. Some researchers have long concluded that swinging your arms was a evolutionary relic, something that might have made sense a long time ago but no longer today (think of the appendix).
The latest work was conducted by Steven Collins from the University of Michigan, working together with researchers from the Netherlands ("Journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B"). Arm swinging, it turns out, requires less of a metabolic cost than keeping your arms still at your sides.
Keeping your arms still expends 12% more metabolic energy (the cost calculated by oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) production). If you hold your arms together while walking, the metabolic cost increases 63%. Now if you walk where your right arm extends forward with your right leg (opposite-to-normal), this results in a 25% increase.
In short, ""Rather than a facultative relic of the locomotion needs of our quadrupedal ancestors, arm swinging is an integral part of the energy economy of human gait."
Some observations about this research. First, sometimes the truth is counterintuitive. Second, the human body is well-oiled machine.