Compression enhances lower‐limb somatosensation in individuals with poor somatosensation, but impairs performance in individuals wth good somatosensation

Abstract

While research suggests that somatosensation contributes to elite athletic performance, little is known regarding the capacity of ergogenic aids (eg, compression) to enhance somatosensation. This study assessed the effects of compression socks on functional ankle somatosensory ability, and whether any effects depended on baseline somatosensation or ankle instability. Forty-two participants performed somatosensation testing using the active movement extent discrimination analysis (AMEDA) device, whereby the accuracy that participants could identify repeated ankle inversion movements of different extents were measured. Participants performed the AMEDA test on their "stabilizing" and "kicking" legs, with (compression; COMP) and without (barefoot control; CON) compression socks. AMEDA scores were also compared against ankle instability using the Cumberland Ankle Instability Tool (CAIT). There were no condition (P = .417) or testing-leg (P = .507) effects for mean AMEDA scores. When participants were ranked into tertiles based on barefoot AMEDA scores, COMP reduced ankle somatosensation in the high tertile (P ≤ .003) and increased ankle somatosensation in the low tertile (P = .023, stabilizing). Compression had no effect (P > .05) on AMEDA scores when participants were split into "low" and "high" CAIT groups. Wearing compression may amplify sensory input in a way that enhances somatosensation for individuals with poor somatosensation, but overloads input and impairs somatosensation of those with good somatosensation. Screening of barefoot ankle somatosensation may be used to identify individuals who might benefit from using compression to improve ankle somatosensation, such as individuals returning to weight-bearing activity following injury, and/or individuals with diminished somatosensation (eg, elderly). K E Y W O R D S ankle injury, injury prevention, neuromuscular control, proprioception 1 | INTRODUCTION Somatosensation is the process of incorporating both proprioceptive and tactile information arising from mechanoreceptors in our skin, muscles, and joints to provide feedback to the central nervous system regarding body position and movements in space. 1 The ability to process this information is more important for skilful tasks than normal activities, 2 suggesting that somatosensation may contribute

Putting the Squeeze on Compression Garments: Current Evidence and Recommendations for Future Research: A Systematic Scoping Review

“…Fifty-nine studies investigated the effects of compression garments on biomechanical and neuromuscular outcomes (Table S2 of the ESM). Studies used a range of participants from recreationally active [53,118,[137][138][139][140][141][142][143][144] to elite-level athletes [39,51,145,146]. A large portion of these studies (49%, n = 29) investigated the effects of compression garments on various kinematic variables including gait [52,95,104,127,132,145,147] and jumping technique [46,48,118,137], limb/muscle oscillatory patterns [39,48,54,121,143,148], range of motion [39,42,46,77,84,88,149,150], and joint angles [16,46,48,51,118,127,…”

“…Neuromuscular parameters were investigated in 33 studies, which comprised predominantly outcomes relating to muscle activation patterns as measured by surface electromyography (n = 20, 34%) [54, 55, 58-60, 63, 68, 75, 76, 82, 127, 140, 142, 143, 146-148, 152, 155, 156]. Additionally, studies have investigated the effects of compression garments on joint proprioception [4,53,121,144,149,157,158], balance and postural control [138,140], stability and lower body joint alignment [16], potentiated recruitment patterns and M-wave characteristics using electrical stimulation (n = 5, 8%) [59,87,159,160], reaction time [73], skeletal muscle metabolic state during exercise [161] and movement-related cortical patterns via electroencephalography [130]. The large majority of studies investigating kinematic outcomes relating to gait (i.e.…”

“…However, a number of studies also reported no effect [58-60, 63, 68, 140, 146, 147, 156] or an increase [82,127] in muscle activation with compression, highlighting the need for more research in this area. Compression was also reported to improve the filtering of 'non-specific' sensory information [155], which may help to explain the compression-induced reported improvements in joint proprioception and repositioning sense [53,121,144,149,157,158], as well as balance and postural sway [16,138]. There is also evidence to suggest that compression garments positively influence potentiated muscle fiber recruitment [52,159] and movement-related cortical patterns [130]; however, research in this area is scarce.…”

Can Compression Garments Reduce Inter-Limb Balance Asymmetries?

“…In the present study, there was a great heterogeneity in the ability of participants to benefit from CG wearing to reduce inter-limb balance asymmetries. Previous studies about the effects of CG on functional somatosensory abilities have produced concordant findings while reporting a strong interindividual variability in responses to the wearing of CG in young healthy participants (You et al, 2004;Cameron et al, 2008;Broatch et al, 2021). After ranking participants according to their score in a movement discrimination task, these studies showed that only participants with poor lower limb somatosensation benefited from the wearing of CG to improve joint position sense, thus illustrating that the magnitude of the beneficial effects of CG wearing was inversely related to the participant's somatosensation at baseline.…”

“…Affordable external devices that interact with cutaneous receptors such as compression garments (CG) can also acutely improve balance control ( Kuster et al, 1999 ; Michael et al, 2014 ; Woo et al, 2017 ; Baige et al, 2020 ). The constriction provided by CG acts as a mechanically supportive framework that can activate interacting cutaneous mechanoreceptors that individually would not have been activated ( Baige et al, 2020 ), thus improving movement accuracy during tasks that include a large somatosensory component ( Hasan et al, 2016 ; Ghai et al, 2018 ; Broatch et al, 2021 ) and offering a potential benefit in reducing inter-limb balance asymmetries. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, no study has specifically investigated the effects of CG wearing on inter-limb balance asymmetries.…”