Balance training in older adults enhances feedback control after perturbations.

Background: As we age, avoiding falls becomes increasingly challenging. While balance training can mitigate such challenges, the specific mechanisms through which balance control improves remains unclear.

Methods: We investigated the impact of balance training in older adults on feedback control after perturbations, focusing on kinematic balance recovery strategies and muscle synergy activation.

Accuracy-speed-stability trade-offs in a targeted stepping task are similar in young and older adults.

Introduction: Stepping accuracy, speed, and stability are lower in older compared to young adults. Lower stepping performance in older adults may be due to larger accuracy-speed-stability trade-offs because of reduced ability to simultaneously fulfill these task-level goals. Our goal was to evaluate whether trade-offs are larger in older compared to young adults in a targeted stepping task.

Improvement in gait stability in older adults after ten sessions of standing balance training.

Balance training aims to improve balance and transfer acquired skills to real-life tasks. How older adults adapt gait to different conditions, and whether these adaptations are altered by balance training, remains unclear. We hypothesized that reorganization of modular control of muscle activity is a mechanism underlying adaptation of gait to training and environmental constraints.

The underlying mechanisms of improved balance after one and ten sessions of balance training in older adults.

Training improves balance control in older adults, but the time course and neural mechanisms underlying these improvements are unclear. We studied balance robustness and performance, H-reflex gains, paired reflex depression, and co-contraction duration in ankle muscles after one and ten training sessions in 22 older adults (+65 yrs). Mediolateral balance robustness, time to balance loss in unipedal standing on a platform with decreasing rotational stiffness, improved (33%) after one session, with no further improvement after ten sessions.