CharlesPapert
Director of Photography
I never did much with the handheld rigs, but I'd suggest that you may be keeping your arm too stiff, the one that is carrying the weight. You have to think of it as something of a shock absorber, focus on letting the bounce from the shoulder not translate down to your wrist. A lot of this is footwork as you indicated (try bending your knees a little, if you aren't already doing so, and think about your motion as a glide). A great exercise for this is to run a length of string across a room (between two stands etc) and fly the camera alongside panned towards the string, so you can really focus on keeping the string in the center of frame as much as possible. You can quickly learn what helps and what doesn't.
That exercise and many more useful ones are detailed in the handbook above. Drills can be repetitious and a little boring but just like playing scales on an instrument, it's the groundwork that you need to start with. Walking around the house or through nature as shown above has its place, but the controlled aspect of the various Steadicam practice exercises will help you hone in on the issues and solutions much faster.
That exercise and many more useful ones are detailed in the handbook above. Drills can be repetitious and a little boring but just like playing scales on an instrument, it's the groundwork that you need to start with. Walking around the house or through nature as shown above has its place, but the controlled aspect of the various Steadicam practice exercises will help you hone in on the issues and solutions much faster.