CoP vs. CoM stabilization strategies: the tightrope balancing case

This study proposes a generalization of the ankle and hip postural strategies to be applied to the large class of skills that share the same basic challenge of defeating the destabilizing effect of gravity on the basis of the same neuromotor control organization, adapted and specialized to variable number of degrees of freedom, different body parts, different muscles, and different sensory feedback channels. In all the cases we can identify two crucial elements (the CoP - Center of Pressure and the CoM - Center of Mass) and the central point of the paper is that most balancing skills can be framed in the CoP-CoM interplay and can be modeled as a combination/alternation of two basic stabilization strategies: the standard well investigated COPS (or CoP strategy, the default option), where the CoM is the controlled variable and the CoP is the control variable, and the less investigated COMS (or CoM strategy), where CoP and CoM must exchange their role because the range of motion of the CoP...