The Effect of Change in Foot Position on Electrical Activity of Human Muscles (Review Article)

The importance of foot position has been widely accepted for biomechanics of various functional movements including fundamental motions (like walking and running), sport performance and job tasks. The aim of the present review study was to assess the effect of change in foot position on electrical activity of human muscles during various movement tasks.

Papers with Persian and English languages published in Google Scholar, PubMed, Science Direct, databases, SID, Magiran, and Irandoc databases were searched between years of 2000 and 2018. For extracting relevant papers, keywords of “Foot position”, “Foot wedge”, “Electromyography”, and “Muscle Activity” and a combination of them were used.

Among the relevant articles, twenty studies were selected for review. Generally, previous studies have shown that the application of wedge in back and front regions of the foot increases and decreases the level of muscle activity, respectively (mainly lower extremity area), but the effects of medial and lateral foot wedges are unclear. Since different analysis methods of raw free signals can have a significant impact on the output value of electromyographic variable signals; comparing the results of different studies should be undertaken with caution.

It seems that the limitations of previous studies in examining the effects of changes in the foot position are related to the following issues. Non-use of people with various types of foot abnormalities; lack of assessment of the trunk muscles activation; lack of using appropriate electromyography signal processing methods; and application of the wooden wedges for changing the foot position instead of real foot orthotics. Therefore, there is a need for further studies on the above issues.