A large body of evidence shows that spinal circuits are significantly affected by training, and that intrinsic circuits that drive locomotor tasks are located in lumbosacral spinal segments in rats with complete spinal cord transection. However, after incomplete lesions, the effect of treadmill training has been debated, which is likely because of the difficulty of separating spontaneous stepping from specific training-induced effects.
A study published in the Neural Regeneration Research (Vol. 8, No. 27, 2013), has shown that after 3 weeks of step training, rats with spinal cord contusion at the T10 level exhibited a significantly greater improvement in the Basso, Beattie and Bresnahan score.