Why Body-Weight Supported Treadmill Training?
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2019-11-28T09:58:41-08:00
Body weight support (BWS) is used in gait training to unload the patient’s bodyweight, facilitating volitional ankle dorsiflexion in patients with neuromuscular diseases like stroke (Kataoka et al., 2017). The patient will wear the harness depicted in Figure 16, which can be adjusted to unload various percentages of their body weight depending on the severity of their motor impairment(s) and how far they have progressed in the intervention (Kataoka et al., 2017). Unloading body weight will allow the patients to exercise more with a lesser build up of fatigue, improving their endurance and allowing for more practice, strengthening the neural pathways being used in the task (Kataoka et al., 2017). Additionally, BWS is found to increase walking velocity in post stroke patients in comparison to treadmill training without BWS, and has fewer reported adverse events (falls or injuries) (Mehrholz et al., 2017). Allowing the patient to ambulate at a higher intensity in conjunction with FES will also allow new pathways resulting from neural reorganization to solidify (Steinle and Carbaley, 2011). This will allow the individual to regain voluntary control of tibialis anterior, the muscle responsible for ankle dorsiflexion, sooner (Steinle and Carbaley, 2011).
