Long-term rail stance training in healthy young adult women

Abstract

Daily rail stance training was performed for no longer than 3 months on 12 healthy Japanese women volunteers with eyes open and closed. Rail width conditions were varied, during which time rail stance was repeated 30 times every day until volunteers could stand for 60 s in at least half the trials. Prolongation of stance time and retention of training effects were investigated. The rate of progress depended on the difficulty of the stance and was determined by rail width and visual conditions. However, marked differences were seen among subjects even under the same training conditions. The faster the progress, the better preserved was the training effect during the post-training period. There was no obvious difference in the learning curve between narrow rails with eyes open and wide rails with eyes closed. We concluded that the retention of the training effect parallels the rate of progress, and this is determined by the difficulty of action relative to the inherent ability of the subjects.