Compression socks enhance sensory feedback to improve standing balance reactions and reflex control of walking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Compression garments are generally used for their potential benefits in exercise performance and post-exercise recovery. Previous studies show that compression sleeves worn at the elbow change neuromuscular control and improve performance during reaching movement. Cutaneous stimulation of the foot skin produces location-specific reflexes in the lower limb that guide foot placement during locomotion. However, it is not clear whether enhancement of sensory feedback with compression socks can alter the neuromuscular excitability of muscles in the leg and amplify balance performance and walking. The current project aimed to determine whether enhanced sensory input from wearing compression socks could affect: 1) spinal cord excitability (as measured by cutaneous reflexes from stimulation at the top or bottom of the foot during locomotion); 2) static balance performance; and, 3) dynamic balance performance following virtual perturbations. METHODS: Twelve participants completed walking and balance tasks wearing four types of garments: 1) non-compression (control) socks; 2) ankle compression socks; 3) calf-compression socks; and, 4) customized ankle sleeves. During walking, electrical stimulations were delivered to three discrete locations on the dorsal (ankle crease, forefoot medial) and plantar (forefoot medial) surfaces of the foot in separate trials with each garment. Electromyography of ankle dorsiflexor tibialis anterior, plantarflexor medial gastrocnemius and evertor peroneus longus were measured bilaterally along with kinematic data from knee and ankle and kinetics under the right (stimulated) foot. RESULTS: Compared to control socks, altered cutaneous reflexes and biomechanical responses were observed in all the conditions during walking. In dynamic balance tests, time and integrated EMG for recovering from virtual perturbation were significantly reduced when wearing calf compression socks and the ankle sleeve. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest sensory enhancement from compression garments modifies spinal cord excitability during walking and improves performance in balance recovery after virtual perturbation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".