Addressing muscle-tendon imbalances in adult male athletes with personalized exercise prescription based on tendon strain.

Purpose: Imbalances of muscle strength and tendon stiffness can increase the operating strain of tendons and risk of injury. Here, we used a new approach to identify muscle-tendon imbalances and personalize exercise prescription based on tendon strain during maximum voluntary contractions (ε) to mitigate musculotendinous imbalances in male adult volleyball athletes.

Methods: Four times over a season, we measured knee extensor strength and patellar tendon mechanical properties using dynamometry and ultrasonography.

Effect of the temporal coordination and volume of cyclic mechanical loading on human Achilles tendon adaptation in men.

Human tendons adapt to mechanical loading, yet there is little information on the effect of the temporal coordination of loading and recovery or the dose-response relationship. For this reason, we assigned adult men to either a control or intervention group. In the intervention group, the two legs were randomly assigned to one of five high-intensity Achilles tendon (AT) loading protocols (i.

Spatiotemporal modulation of a common set of muscle synergies during unpredictable and predictable gait perturbations in older adults.

Muscle synergies as functional low-dimensional building blocks of the neuromotor system regulate the activation patterns of muscle groups in a modular structure during locomotion. The purpose of the current study was to explore how older adults organize locomotor muscle synergies to counteract unpredictable and predictable gait perturbations during the perturbed steps and the recovery steps. Sixty-three healthy older adults (71.

Assessment and modelling of the activation-dependent shift in optimal length of the human soleus muscle in vivo.

Previous in vitro and in situ studies have reported a shift in optimal muscle fibre length for force generation (L) towards longer length at decreasing activation levels (also referred to as length-dependent activation), yet the relevance for in vivo human muscle contractions with a variable activation pattern remains largely unclear. By a combination of dynamometry, ultrasound and electromyography (EMG), we experimentally obtained muscle force-fascicle length curves of the human soleus at 100%, 60% and 30% EMG levels from 15 participants aiming to investigate activation-dependent shifts in L in vivo. The results showed a significant increase in L of 6.