The effect of expertise in gymnastics on postural control

The goal of this paper was (1) to investigate if gymnasts have a more stabl e standing posture than experts in other sports, and (2) to determine how m uch gymnasts are affected by the removal of vision in different postural ta sks. Six expert gymnasts and six experts in other non-gymnastic sports were asked to maintain balance in three standing postures of increasing difficu lty: bipedal, unipedal, and unipedal + unstable support (i.e. 7 cm thick fo am surface). Each posture was tested successively with and without vision. Based on the displacement of the center of pressure (range and mean average speed), the results showed that when visual cues were available, postural sway increased with the difficulty of the task, but both groups had compara ble performance in all the tasks. When vision was removed, although both gr oups demonstrated larger postural sway in the unipedal tasks, this effect w as less accentuated for the gymnasts. We concluded that gymnasts are able t o use the remaining sensory modalities to compensate for the lack of vision in unstable postures. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights re served.