The Froude number may be used to study trends in animal gait patterns. In analyses of the dynamics of legged locomotion, a walking limb is often modeled as an inverted pendulum, where the center of mass goes through a circular arc centered at the foot. The Froude number is the ratio of the centripetal force around the center of motion, the foot, and the weight of the animal walking:
where  is the mass,  is the characteristic length,  is the acceleration due to gravity and  is the velocity. The characteristic length  may be chosen to suit the study at hand. For instance, some studies have used the vertical distance of the hip joint from the ground, while others have used total leg length.
The Froude number may also be calculated from the stride frequency  as follows:
If total leg length is used as the characteristic length, then the theoretical maximum speed of walking has a Froude number of 1.0 since any higher value would result in takeoff and the foot missing the ground. The typical transition speed from bipedal walking to running occurs with .  R. M. Alexander found that animals of different sizes and masses travelling at different speeds, but with the same Froude number, consistently exhibit similar gaits. This study found that animals typically switch from an amble to a symmetric running gait (e.g., a trot or pace) around a Froude number of 1.0. A preference for asymmetric gaits (e.g., a canter, transverse gallop, rotary gallop, bound, or pronk) was observed at Froude numbers between 2.0 and 3.0.