View clinical trials related to Spine Stiffness.
Filter by:In this research project, effects of two sports specific types of fatiguing protocols on trunk muscles and specific trunk stability indicators will be studied. In general, sports activities involving gross motor activities activate higher percentage of muscle mass. In addition, such activities usually demand increased ventilation and more demanding inter-muscular activation. Such an example is running, with medium intensity until exhaustion or with the goal to cover the longest distance possible in a given time. On the contrary, sports practice often incorporates local strengthening exercises into a workout, especially for the trunk muscles. These, if performed correctly, cause localized muscle fatigue and can affect their function. Understanding the effects of these activities is of importance for coaches as well as for health care providers, as other types of training usually follow such activities that can more easily lead to trunk or spinal overload. We expect that localized muscle strengthening protocol until exhaustion will have more detrimental effects on trunk stability indicators as fatiguing with exhaustive running. In these study 100 subjects will be studied, divided into two groups. First group will perform an exhaustive running protocol and the second group a localized trunk muscle strengthening protocol until exhaustion. The effect of intervention will be studied by observing the changes in trunk muscle reflex responses following sudden arm loading and changes in anticipated trunk muscle activation during a quick arm raising task. Activation latencies and electromyographic (EMG) amplitude, and center of foot pressure excursion will be used to quantify trunk stability. In addition, center of pressure movement during a sitting balance task will be studied as to gather information of local trunk stabilization functions. Finally, changes in joint position sense will be assessed in order to account for the possible changes in kinesthesia.