## 4 Discussion
Sports activity groupings: (1) No sport undertaken; (2) 1\(\times\) per week; (3) 2\(\times\) per week; (4) >2\(\times\) per week; median, minimum and maximum of the posturographic parameters. Significant \(p\)-values are shown in bold; n = number of subjects. right forefoot (13%). The increased rear foot loading is due to the center of mass of the human body at the level of the promontory [8]. The line of gravity starting from the total body center of mass runs through the ankle joints toward the balls of the feet, thus leading to increased weight bearing on the rearfoot [8,31]. Due to orthopedic diseases being considered exclusion criteria in the present study, knee disorders [32], ankle instabilities [33] or neuropathies of the feet [34,35], for example, were not responsible for the negative effects on weight distribution and body sway. The increased left forefoot loading of approximately 5% difference to the right forefoot loading should be analyzed more thoroughly in further studies. An influence of handedness seems rather unlikely here as the test subjects were mostly right-handed. A more detailed investigation of exclusively left-handed subjects in future would be able to show any influence of handedness in comparison with the present study. Despite that this study involves balance and thus the question of the dominant leg would have been more obvious, here the focus has been on handedness. Since the dominant leg can vary depending on the activity, i.e., shooting soccer with the right leg and jumping high jump with the left leg, this orientation is not as useful as the handedness. Therefore, the question of dominant leg overwhelms many individuals, especially females of this age. Therefore, the question of handedness is easier and clearer to answer than the question of the dominant leg. Even though the dominant leg question is closer in terms of the measurement system at hand, we chose to ask about handedness, we have eliminated the bias of unconscious misreporting due to overwhelm. The differences between the dominant hand and the dominant leg in terms of available results, should be considered in further studies. Additionally, of interest in this context would be the assessment of lower and upper limb muscle strength, which can be recorded using other methods. The values of approximately balanced left-right loadings obtained from this work correspond fundamentally to the data of other authors [14,16,18,19,18,20,36]. This is also true for the forefoot and rear foot loadings [13,14,18,19,36,37]. These body weight distribution values appear to be consistent, regardless of age and/or sex. Consequently, due to the large number of subjects, the reproducible analysis procedure and the comparability to other studies [13,14,16,18,19,36,37], the values of the present work can be regarded as representative cross section for healthy women aged 51-60 years. Standard values for body sway in the frontal and sagittal planes, as well as the ellipse area, can also be assigned as 11 mm in the frontal plane and 16 mm in the sagittal plane, with a standardized ellipse area of 1.17 cm\({}^{2}\) from this study. However, when considering the frontal and sagittal sway values of 21-30-year-old women (9.50 and 13 mm, respectively) [17] and 31-40-year-old women (8.17 mm/12 mm) [19], these values are lower than those in the present study, while those of 41-50-year-olds are larger and almost identical, respectively, with 13 mm in the frontal variation and 16.5 mm in the sagittal variation [20]. Consequently, the notion that the sway in joint weight is influenced by age can only be partially confirmed [4,5,38]. Regarding the weak positive correlations between age and the parameters sagittal and frontal body sway as well as the ellipse area and width, it can be concluded that the ability to balance slowly decreases over the course of life even without subjective, pathological information.