Metabolic costs of stoopwalking and crawling

This paper is a study of the metabolic costs of crawling and stoopwalking as performed by trained male and female subjects. After training, male and female subjects crawled and stoopwalked at a range of task speeds and in task postures set at 100, 90, 80, 70, and 60% of each subject's erect stature. It was found that as the task posture became more stooped, or the task speed increased, there were marked increases in metabolic cost. Further analysis found these increases to be due to the task speed within a posture rather than from the task posture. It was also found that in some task postures, the combination of speed and posture resulted in metabolic costs of performance which would be limiting in terms of non-fatigued task performance time.