Force Control of Ankle Dorsiflexors in Young Adults: Effects of Bilateral Control and Leg Dominance

Abstract

We investigated whether bilateral lower-limb control and leg dominance affect force control ability in 15 healthy young adults (9 males and 6 females, age =26.8 ± 4.1 years). Participants performed isometric ankle dorsiflexion force control tasks, matching a visual target (10% of maximal effort) as quickly and precisely as possible in ballistic and tonic tasks. Performance was evaluated using force error, force steadiness, amount of muscle activity of the tibialis anterior, and response time characteristics. Results showed no significant effects of leg dominance during both ballistic and tonic tasks, while bilateral condition resulted in significantly larger error, less force steadiness, compared to unilateral condition, and only during the tonic task. Consequently, bilateral control, specifically in tasks utilizing feedback control (i.e., tonic task) might affect force control ability, possibly because of the interhemispheric inhibition to meet bilateral task complexity and integrate afferent bilateral sensory information from both right and left legs.

Keywords:

• Force control
• ankle dorsiflexion
• bilateral control
• leg dominance

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Kohtaroh Hagio for his technical support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This project was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) [17F17733 and 26242056].