Immediate beneficial effects of self-monitoring body movements for upright postural stability in young healthy individuals

SummaryObjectiveThe present study is an investigation of whether an intervention involving awareness of joint movement without vision (i.e., self-monitoring) contributes to improved stability of upright posture as measured immediately after self-monitoring.MethodsEighteen young adults (ages: 22.6 ± 2.2 years) participated in two interventions: self-monitoring and control. In the self-monitoring intervention, the blindfolded participants tried to reproduce a target angle using both the ankle and the wrist while self-monitoring the movement. In the control intervention, they performed the same task while continuously performing an arithmetic subtraction task.ResultsPre-post measurements of postural stability using a force plate for each intervention showed that self-monitoring significantly improved the stability of unipedal posture but not that of bipedal posture. Such beneficial effect for unipedal posture was obtained even when the participant monitored the wrist movement.ConclusionsSelf-monitoring was effective to improve postural stability in cases in which maintaining the whole body balance was challenging.