Exercise and neuromuscular ageing

One out of three seniors above 65 years of age falls once a year. Balance training attenuates declines of neuromuscular capacity and reduces fall rates by 21%. Also fall risk factors (e.g., static, reactive, dynamic and functional balance) benefit in a dose-response relationship from balance training. On the other hand, recent training studies and meta-analyses emphasized that adaptations to balance training seem to be highly task-specific. Transfer effects to non-trained neuromuscular tasks are limited. Thus, the present talk draws a bow from mechanistic considerations of neuromuscular adaptations to neuromuscular training over traditional and non-traditional fall-preventive exercise training programs to evidence-based best-practice recommendations. This lecture underlines the importance of the “task-specificity principle” of balance training adaptations during exercise-based fall prevention. Second, several appealing exercise training approaches on fall risk factors will be discussed in the light of potential “agility” performance in older people. We will further elaborate how these aspects track into general exercise-based fall prevention recommendations. The talk might be relevant for a broad audience interested in recent findings on mechanistic considerations of balance training adaptations and exercise-based and health-related fall prevention recommendations in older people from a practitioners’ and researchers’ perspective.