Citation

Liu X, Bhatt T, Pai YC. J. Biomech. 2015; 49(2): 135-140.

Affiliation

Department of Physical Therapy, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60612, United States. Electronic address: cpai@uic.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.jbiomech.2015.06.004

PMID

26159058

Abstract

Very little is known how training intensity interacts with the generalization from treadmill-slip to overground slip. The purposes of this study were to determine whether treadmill-slip training can improve center-of-mass stability, more so in the reactive than in the proactive control of stability, with high intensity (HI with a trial-to-trial-consistent acceleration of 12m/s(2)) better than low intensity training (LO with a consistent acceleration of 6m/s(2)) against overground slip; and whether progressively-increasing intensity (INCR with a block-to-block acceleration varied from 6 to 12m/s(2)) was better than progressively-decreasing intensity training (DECR with an acceleration varied from 12 to 6m/s(2)) in such generalization. Thirty-six young subjects, evenly assigned to one of four (HI, LO, INCR, DECR) groups, underwent 24 treadmill-slips before their generalization test trial with a novel slip during overground walking. The controls (CTRL, n=9) from existing data only experienced the same novel overground slip without treadmill training but under otherwise identical condition. The results showed that treadmill-slip training did improved balance control on overground slip with a greater impact on subjects' reactive (44.3%) than proactive control of stability (27.1%) in comparison to the CTRL. HI yielded stronger generalization than LO, while INCR was only marginally better than DECR. Finally, the group means of these four displayed a clear ascending order from CTRL, LO, DECR, INCR, to HI. The results suggested that higher training intensity on treadmill led to a better generalization, while a progressively-increase in intensity had a slight advantage over the progressively-decrease strategy.

Language: en