The Role of Ankle Proprioception for Balance Control in relation to Sports Performance and Injury

Abstract

Balance control improvement is one of the most important goals in sports and exercise. Better balance is strongly positively associated with enhanced athletic performance and negatively associated with lower limb sports injuries. Proprioception plays an essential role in balance control, and ankle proprioception is arguably the most important. This paper reviews ankle proprioception and explores synergies with balance control, specifically in a sporting context. Central processing of ankle proprioceptive information, along with other sensory information, enables integration for balance control. When assessing ankle proprioception, the most generalizable findings arise from methods that are ecologically valid, allow proprioceptive signals to be integrated with general vision in the central nervous system, and reflect the signal-in-noise nature of central processing. Ankle proprioceptive intervention concepts driven by such a central processing theory are further proposed and discussed for the improvement of balance control in sport.

Figure 1

Examples of ankle proprioceptive assessment methods. (a) depicts the threshold to detection of passive motion (TTDPM) method, adapted from Yasuda et al. [32]; (b) depicts the joint position reproduction (JPR) method, adapted from Willems et al. [33]; and (c) depicts the active movement extent discrimination assessment (AMEDA) method, adapted from Symes et al. [34].