Lower-limb Proprioceptive Awareness in Professional Ballet Dancers

Abstract

Enhanced proprioceptive feedback strengthens synergistic muscle groups and stabilizes the coordination of limbs, thus contributing to the movement efficiency of ballet dancers. The present study compared lower-limb proprioceptive awareness in professional ballet dancers to matched controls who had no dance training. Two assessment methods were used to test the hypothesis that ballet dancers would demonstrate increased proprioceptive awareness in the ankle, knee, and hip: 1. a joint-position matching task to assess static proprioceptive joint awareness, and 2. an eyes-closed, quiet standing task to assess both static and dynamic proprioceptive awareness through measures of center of pressure (COP) variability. Results of the matching task indicated that the dancers exhibited greater proprioceptive awareness than controls for all three joints (p < 0.001). Also, dancers were equally aware of the positioning of their ankle, knee, and hip joints (p > 0.05), whereas controls were less aware of their ankle position compared to their knee and hip joints (p < 0.001). Measures indexing COP variability during quiet standing did not differ between groups and thus failed to reflect increased proprioceptive awareness in dancers (all p > 0.05). This indicates that quiet stance may have limited value as a means for evaluating proprioception. These findings provide preliminary evidence that enhanced proprioceptive awareness of lower limb joints should be considered as an evaluative criterion for dancers' ability to learn complex ballet skills. They also indicate that quiet standing tasks may not provide sufficient challenge for dancers' enhanced proprioceptive awareness to manifest.

Population Differences in Postural Response Strategy Associated with Exposure to a Novel Continuous Perturbation Stimuli: Would Dancers Have Better Balance on a Boat?

“…Results for the Inexperienced group closely resemble the rapid habituation observed in continuous low acceleration perturbing environments and high acceleration transient perturbations that show significant improvements and adaptations after the first trial [6, 7, 18]. The slightly faster adaptations of the dancers when compared to the Inexperienced group may be due to the fact that dancers have learned to rely on vision and enhanced somatosensory abilities and increased proprioceptive feedback that may strengthen synergist muscle activity and limb coordination in response development [33, 14]. …”

Physiology and pathophysiology of low back pain in ballet dancers

“…slower reflex times and diminished proprioception (Collins et al 1995). This appears inconsistent with our data collected from professional ballet dancers who are considered balance experts with highly trained sensorimotor control (Golomer et al 1999a, Golomer andDupui 2000); faster response times (Simmons 2005a) and superior lower limb proprioception than non-dancers (Kiefer et al 2013). Sensory information in standing comes from multiple sources; somatosensory, vestibular and visual systems .…”

“…Comparing the effect of visual suppression between dancers and non-dancers using linear measures of CoP motion reveals conflicting data. Several studies report no difference between dancers and non-dancers (Kiefer et al 2013, Schmit et al 2005, Simmons 2005b) across a range of standing tasks without vision. Other work has shown less increase in CoP motion with eye closure (Golomer et al 1999a, Golomer and Dupui 2000, Stins et al 2009) and greater CoP motion with eye closure in dancers compared with untrained participants (Hugel et al 1999, Perrin et al 2002.…”

“…Ballet dancers perform better on balance tests than non-dancers (Ambegaonkar et al 2013, Crotts et al 1996 and are reported to have faster and more consistent postural muscle responses (Simmons 2005a), superior sensorimotor control (Golomer et al 1999a, Golomer andDupui 2000), and more accurate lower limb proprioception (Kiefer et al 2013). Dancers without LBP also demonstrated a pattern of reaching 'saturation point' (i.e.…”

Understanding the Impact of Expertise in Joint and Solo-Improvisation

“…One common way to identify the individual characteristics is to compare novice with experts. The idea is to quantify and qualify what makes an expert, the one able to perform unique, optimized, efficient, and proficient movement patterns (Kiefer et al, 2011, 2013). To characterize individual movement expertise, researchers have targeted a specific population: expert dancers.…”