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

Abstract

The 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. Eighteen 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. Pre-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. Self-monitoring was effective to improve postural stability in cases in which maintaining the whole body balance was challenging.