Clinical Use of Gait Analysis for the Athlete

Observational Gait Analysis (OGA) has been utilized by clinicians for more than a century and still used in practice today. OGA is an inexpensive method for obtaining a visual assessment of the human gait, but has limitations. The primary criticism of OGA is the limited reproducibility and usefulness of the data and/or subjective observations. Researchers and clinicians began to work on to standardize OGA by creating the Physician Rating Scale (PRS) [1]. The researchers would evaluate six variables on a 2–4 point scale. An example of one of the variables is the knee position at mid-stance. This variable shows a good to excellent reliability, yet only has a moderate level of accuracy.