2.4.1. Conventional Proprioceptive Training (Conventional Group/GCV)
The training was carried out three times a week, for 8 weeks, for a total of 24 sessions, with a duration of 50 min per session and a minimum interval of 48 h between each session. The training protocol was organized as follows: warm-up (10 min), proprioceptive training (30 min), and cool-down (10 min), with the monitoring of blood pressure and heart rate before and after the activities.The warm-up was performed with walking (4 min) and stretching exercises for the muscles of the upper and lower limbs and spine (6 min). The warm-up was conducted with breathing exercises (5 min) and stretching exercises (5 min). The participants were warned not to alter their activities of daily living during the intervention period, thus avoiding the possible influences of external factors on the outcomes of the research.The conventional proprioceptive training protocol involved gait, balance, and proprioception training and was spatially organized in the form of a circuit with different textures and obstacles, consisting of seven stations. The materials used were: 1 dense mattress of dimension 120 × 70 × 10 cm (station 1), 1 foam module—a mini beam of dimension 190 × 22 × 10 cm (station 2), 4 agility rings with 42 cm diameter (station 3), 1 proprioceptive lateral board of dimension 60 × 36 × 8 cm (station 4), 2 agility cones of the dimensions 23 × 14 cm (station 5), 1 proprioceptive disc of 40 cm in diameter (station 6), and 3 agility barriers of the dimensions 70 × 15/ 70 × 20/ 70 × 25 cm (station 7).The older women participated, in groups of two or three, in specific exercises at each station that were combined with sensory and motor stimulation, as follows:Station 1: Lateral strides (right and left), forward and backward strides on an unstable surface (dense mattress), exercises in bipodal and unipodal support (right and left) with eyes open and closed, agility training with ball throwing.Station 2: Forward, backward, and sideward march (right and left) with a narrow base on an unstable surface (mini foam board), march alternating between floor and mini-board, agility training with ball throw.Station 3: Forward, backward, sideways, and cross-legged march between the agility rings.Station 4: Latero-lateral and anteroposterior exercise on the lateral proprioceptive board with eyes open and closed, agility training with ball throw.Station 5: Forward, backward, and sideward march between cones with a narrow base and circumferential path with full foot support, with heel support only, and with forefoot support only.Station 6: Exercises on the proprioceptive disk with multidirectional shifts with eyes open and closed and agility training with ball throwing.Station 7: Forward, backward, and sideward march over agility barriers and agility training with ball throw.Each participant remained for two minutes at each station, with a thirty-second break between stations. After going through all seven stations, the forward, sideways, and backward march was performed again through all the stations continuously without breaks, and only a thirty-second break at the end of each circuit, until the proposed time of 30 min was completed.The degree of difficulty was increased throughout the training through the speed and execution of the activities. In all sessions, each elderly woman was accompanied by a researcher, and the execution and physical capacity of each participant in relation to the execution of the activities were taken into consideration. The exercises of the conventional training protocol were based on the consulted literature [