Better Balance

Balance Cannot Be Trained Well in a Fatigued State

Study

A group of researchers conducted a study on balance training to determine whether training in a fatigued state would be superior to training in a non fatigued state.  To explore this, 45 Participants were broken into 3 different groups.  Group 1 trained balance alone; Group 2 trained balance followed by a 25 minute HIIT Session; Group 3 performed a 25 minute HIIT session followed by balance training.  Subjects were trained for 6 weeks, twice a week on 4 different balance tasks for 8 sets each (32 sets each session). They also had balance tested in the beginning of the study to assess baselines while fresh and after a shuttle run to exhaustion to assess balance in a fatigued state. Following the 6 week intervention they were tested again and researchers found that the balance only group averaged a 14.1% improvement in balance when fresh and 7.2% when fatigued.  The balance followed by HIIT averaged a 17.8% improvement when fresh and 9.6% when fatigued and the HIIT followed by balance group only averaged only a 6.1% improvement in balance when fresh and 0.4% when fatigued.

Recommendation

For balance training to be effective it needs to be performed in the beginning of a training session in an unfatigued state.

Source

Keller et al. “Balance Training Under Fatigue: A Randomized Controlled Trial on the Effect of Fatigue on Adaptations to Balance Training.” Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Vol. 38, Issue 2, February 2024, pp.297-305, DOI: 10.1519/JSC.0000000000004620