Physical activity and sport practice to improve balance control of visually impaired individuals: a narrative review with future perspectives

Abstract

Visual disability negatively impacts balance, everyday self-efficacy, and mobility and often leads affected subjects to perceive physical exercise as a burdensome challenge thus discouraging them from practicing. Despite the well-proven benefits of regular physical activity in visually impaired people, especially addressing postural control, there are no specific guidelines and most of the available literature seems to be flawed by critical issues. Given the wide heterogeneity and the multidimensional needs of this population, a more realistic and target-specific perspective is needed in order to properly investigate and promote exercise practice and adherence for balance improvement. On this basis, through a critical overview of the recent literature, the present article aimed to enrich the current knowledge about this topic by providing innovative suggestions, both practical and methodological, and specifically deepening the disability-related deficits and peculiarities of different age ranges. Moreover, since a multidisciplinary approach is advisable when designing and leading exercise protocols tailored to visually impaired individuals, such innovative hints also highlighted the central role of the adapted physical activity specialist, hence contributing to foster its official professional recognition and involvement in this field.

Female blind baseball players against gender discrimination: the “red diamonds” experience

“…Specifically detailing psychological wellbeing, evaluated through the PWB-18 scale, statistically significant differences between sight-impaired and sighted women, in favor of the latter, were detected in the environmental mastery and self-acceptance dimensions, as well as in the total score. Since visual disability deeply and negatively impacts interaction with the surrounding environment and daily-life self-efficacy, such results simply reflect the specific impairment-related issues ( 4 ). Moreover, given that the visually impaired women adhering to the study were younger than their sighted counterpart, a lack of environmental experience and self-awareness could be ascribed also to the younger age ( 62 ).…”

“…Specifically, it is well-known that visual impairment deeply impacts psychological, social, and physical functionality, thus hindering participation in daily-life, leisure, and sport activities ( 4 ). According to several studies, visually impaired people perceive and experience prejudices, barriers, accessibility issues, and restrictions in participation in a regular and structured physical activity throughout their lifespan ( 5 – 8 ).…”

“…The literature repeatedly highlighted the difficulty in assessing the health-related quality of life in this target population though simultaneously acknowledging the key role played on it by physical activity and sport practice ( 9 , 19 ). Indeed, constant physical exercise engagement enhances cardiorespiratory functionality, postural control, coordination, balance, and social/environmental interactions with consequent improvement in sensorimotor efficiency, autonomy, and the overall health status ( 4 ). Moreover, given the multiple values, primarily fair play, effort, discipline, respect, challenge, teamwork, and membership underlying sport engagement, a regular and structured practice may help counteracting the aforementioned disability-related deficits while promoting self-efficacy, social integration, and body confidence ( 20 ).…”

Biofeedback-Based Proprioceptive Training to Improve Functional Prerequisites of Dragon Boating in Breast Cancer Survivors

“…According to the aforementioned evidence and applying an innovative perspective simultaneously oriented to daily life and sport performance improvement, the main focus of our adapted athletic training intervention was to promote the upper body functionality of BC survivors practicing dragon boating through a proprioceptive multimodal approach. Since trunk postural control and segmental coordination cannot be increased without reinforcing global body awareness, anatomofunctional prerequisites, and conditional skills [17,71,118,119], a total body circuit training methodology has been applied. The use of a biofeedback-based tool, purposely designed for proprioceptive quantitative evaluation/improvement [68], and a tailored exercise load progression allowed us to reach the main goal of our intervention taking into account the individual skills and fitness level of each participant.…”

“…It has been demonstrated that motor efficiency is strongly linked to the most archaic component of the proprioceptive system that can be productively stimulated and re-educated exclusively through a high-frequency proprioceptive input flow [70]. When variance is detected by the traditional tilting boards, the sensorized ones apply high-frequency signals able to train the subject to properly select and interpret them, thus progressively generating rapid and relevant sensorimotor responses [71,72]. Such a methodological approach also allows us to objectively evaluate the individual motor skills and consequently tailor each exercise aim/load to them [73,74].…”