The Contribution of Postural Adjustments to Body Balance and Motor Performance

Book excerpt: The control of balance by the central nervous system is crucial to maintain our posture and perform efficiently our daily motor tasks. This control requires the development of dynamical phenomena sub-served by highly-coordinated patterns of muscle activation/deactivation disseminated throughout the whole-body and called “postural adjustments”. Establishing the interaction between balance control, locomotion and cognition has important clinical implication, especially in term of falls prevention, and will improve our knowledge on the underlying neural correlates. This Research Topic provides an up-to-date picture of the relationship between postural adjustments, body balance and motor performance in healthy (young and older adults) and pathological participants. It includes 36 contributions (1 editorial, 28 original articles, 4 reviews and 3 methods articles) which are separated into four sections: 1. Postural maintenance and multisensory integration, 2. Anticipatory postural adjustments associated with voluntary movement, 3. Postural adjustments associated with predictable and unpredictable external perturbation, 4. Gait assessment and rehabilitation in aging. Beside their basic interest of unveiling the mechanisms behind motor control, results from the investigations of this topic are relevant to develop new methods or tools to improve postural stability and motor performance, with applications in the fields of neurodegenerative conditions, rehabilitation, ergonomics and sports sciences.