Depending on what is meant by “swinging foot movement,” that could actually be either quite counterintuitive, or specific to muggers not attuned to signs of martial training. If I see someone crescent-stepping, which I would characterize as a non-swinging foot movement, that would lead me to raise my estimate of the probability that the person has studied karate or a similar art. The link didn’t work for me, so I couldn’t check if I was misunderstanding the term. The rest of the signs make sense.
(On a side note, academic prose is terrible at describing bodily movements. I’ve read it twice or thrice now and still have no idea what movements exactly the abstract is talking about besides ‘longer stride length, faster walk’.)
Depending on what is meant by “swinging foot movement,” that could actually be either quite counterintuitive, or specific to muggers not attuned to signs of martial training. If I see someone crescent-stepping, which I would characterize as a non-swinging foot movement, that would lead me to raise my estimate of the probability that the person has studied karate or a similar art. The link didn’t work for me, so I couldn’t check if I was misunderstanding the term. The rest of the signs make sense.
For those not familiar with crescent-stepping (as I was not, my own martial art being taekwondo rather than karate), the videos in http://dandjurdjevic.blogspot.com/2010/12/crescent-stepping.html seem to be representative.
(On a side note, academic prose is terrible at describing bodily movements. I’ve read it twice or thrice now and still have no idea what movements exactly the abstract is talking about besides ‘longer stride length, faster walk’.)
The url needed to be corrected. It works now, and my apologies for the inconvenience.
“Swinging foot movement” isn’t defined in the article. I’m guessing it means that the leg is allowed to move as a relatively free pendulum.