Practice walking on a treadmill-mounted balance beam modifies beam walking sacral movement and alters performance in other balance tasks.

Publisher: Public Library of Science Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 101285081 Publication Model: eCollection Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1932-6203 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 19326203 NLM ISO Abbreviation: PLoS One Subsets: MEDLINE

Original Publication: San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science

Sacrum* ; Walking*; Humans ; Gait ; Movement ; Postural Balance ; Biomechanical Phenomena

The goals of this study were to determine if a single 30-minute session of practice walking on a treadmill mounted balance beam: 1) altered sacral marker movement kinematics during beam walking, and 2) affected measures of balance during treadmill walking and standing balance. Two groups of young, healthy human subjects practiced walking on a treadmill mounted balance beam for thirty minutes. One group trained with intermittent visual occlusions and the other group trained with unperturbed vision. We hypothesized that the subjects would show changes in sacrum movement kinematics after training and that there would be group differences due to larger improvements in beam walking performance by the visual occlusions group. We also investigated if there was any balance transfer from training on the beam to treadmill walking (margin of stability) and to standing static balance (center of pressure excursion). We found significant differences in sacral marker maximal velocity after training for both groups, but no significant differences between the two groups from training. There was limited evidence of balance transfer from beam-walking practice to gait margin of stability for treadmill walking and for single leg standing balance, but not for tandem stance balance. The number of step-offs while walking on a narrow beam had the largest change with training (partial η2 = 0.7), in accord with task specificity. Other balance metrics indicative of transfer had lower effect sizes (partial η2<0.5). Given the limited transfer across balance training tasks, future work should examine how intermittent visual occlusions during multi-task training improve real world functional outcomes.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Symeonidou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

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R01 NS104772 United States NS NINDS NIH HHS

Date Created: 20230615 Date Completed: 20230619 Latest Revision: 20231118

20250114

PMC10270570

10.1371/journal.pone.0283310

37319297