Effects of ankle exercises on balance ability when using shoe height insoles.
Daehee Lee, Seulki Han, Sangyong Lee
PMID 27799702WHAT IT FOUND
Young adults doing four weeks of combined ankle stretching, resistance and balance exercises improved balance while wearing 3, 5 and 7 cm height insoles; the control group did not, and the exercise parts cannot be separated.
Key findings
01The ankle exercise group showed significant balance improvement in all height-insole conditions (3, 5 and 7 cm) compared with before the programme.
02The control group showed no significant balance improvement in any height-insole condition (3, 5 and 7 cm).
03The exercise group showed significantly better balance than the control group for all height insoles after the programme.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
Only 30 healthy adults in their 20s were studied, so the results do not show what happens in older adults or people with existing balance, foot, neurological or musculoskeletal problems. The paper does not report dropouts, blinding, allocation concealment, or what the control group did during the four weeks. The exercise programme combined stretching, resistance training and balance work, and the paper says it could not determine which component contributed most. The authors discuss preventing ankle joint damage and applying findings to high-heeled shoes, but the study measured only balance scores while wearing height insoles. The paper does not name a primary outcome, and it reports several insole-height comparisons without explaining how multiple comparisons were handled.
Declared interests
No funding or conflict-of-interest statement appears in the supplied text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that height-increasing insoles improve balance, or that a single ankle exercise caused the improvement. The participants wore insoles while balance was measured, but the gain followed a combined programme of stretching, resistance and balance work, and the paper says it could not separate the contributions of those exercises.