The ability to modulate ongoing walking gait with precise, voluntary adjustments, is what allows animals to navigate complex terrains. However, how the nervous system generates the signals to precisely control the limbs while simultaneously maintaining locomotion is poorly understood. One potential strategy is to distribute the neural activity related to these two functions into distinct cortical activity co-activation subspaces so that both may be carried out simultaneously without disruptive interference. To investigate this hypothesis, we recorded the activity of primary motor cortex in male nonhuman primates during obstacle avoidance on a treadmill. We found that the same neural population was active during both basic unobstructed locomotion and volitional obstacle avoidance movements. We identified the neural modes spanning the subspace of the low-dimensional dynamics in M1 and found a subspace that consistently maintains the same cyclic activity throughout obstacle stepping, despite large changes in ...