Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 26, 2025
Evaluating Postural Control and Lower-extremity Muscle Activation in Individuals with Chronic Ankle Instability
Published on: September 18, 2020
Can ankle proprioception be improved by repeated exposure to an ankle movement discrimination task requiring
Ruoni Yu1, Zonghan Yang2, Jeremy Witchalls3
1School of Medicine, Jinhua Polytechnic, Jinhua, China.
Objectives:
To determine whether individuals with and without Chronic Ankle Instability (CAI) can improve their ankle movement discrimination sensitivity by repeated exposure to an ankle proprioceptive task requiring landing.
Design:
A repeated-measures study.
Setting:
University laboratory.
Participants:
24 university students, 11 with CAI and 13 without CAI.
Main Outcome Measures:
Ankle proprioception was measured using the Ankle Inversion Discrimination Apparatus for Landing (AIDAL) over 3 occasions: AIDAL-1 and AIDAL-2 separated with a 10-min interval, and AIDAL-3 at 24 h post AIDAL-2.
Results:
Better Cumberland Ankle Instability Tool (CAIT) questionnaire scores were correlated with higher AIDAL scores (rho = 0.465, p = 0.022). Two-way ANOVA showed a significant CAI main effect for step landing ankle inversion proprioception, with CAI worse (F = 8.410, p = 0.008), but the Time main effect across the 3 AIDAL tests was not significant (F = 1.552, p = 0.223).
Conclusions:
The AIDAL assessment was sensitive in terms of discriminating between individuals with or without CAI. However, the step-down component of the AIDAL proprioceptive task was possibly too challenging. For CAI, physical therapy exercises should take into account the difficulty of the training task, so that a demonstrable learning effect can be achieved.
