Treadmill walking - is it different from walking overground? A cross-sectional study investigating 28 healthy people walking overground and on a treadmill with and without body weight support.

Mona Kristin Aaslund

Section of Physiotherapy Science, University of Bergen, 2006

Abstract

Objective: To determine how gait variables are affected by walking on a treadmill, wearing a harness, and using body weight support systems.

Background: Treadmill therapy has become an increasingly popular intervention, and is looked at as being a task-specific intervention for relearning how to walk.

Design: Cross-sectional repeated measures design.

Method: 28 healthy subjects walked at six different walking conditions; overground walking with and without harness, treadmill walking with and without harness, and walking on the treadmill with 30 per cent dynamic and static body weight support. A triaxial trunk accelerometer was used to measure acceleration around centre of mass (COM). From this mean acceleration (RMS), interstride trunk acceleration variability, tilt of trunk, and cadence was calculated. All gait variables were compared at a velocity of 1.2 m/s.

Results:General Linear Model (GLM) repeated measures mixed between-within subject analyses of variance (ANOVA) revealed that on the treadmill cadence increased, the trunk tilted more forwards, vertical acceleration RMS increased, and anteroposterior trunk acceleration became more variable. Wearing a harness resulted in more restricted vertical mean acceleration. When using body weight support mean acceleration became more restricted in all directions. Trunk acceleration became more variable in anteroposterior and vertical direction, and more stereotypical in the mediolateral direction. Static body weight support tended to give more significant differences compared to dynamic body weight support.

Conclusion: Gait is affected significantly when walking on a treadmill, when using a harness, and when using approximately 30 per cent dynamic and static body weight support. Based on this the task-specificity of treadmill therapy is questioned.

Key words: Treadmill, body weight support (BWS), harness, gait, trunk accelerometry, task-specific, transfer

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Department of Public Health and Primary Health Care, last updated 24.02.06