Muscle Synergy of Collegiate Rowers During 6 Min Maximal Rowing on Fixed and Slides Ergometer

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the muscle synergy of collegiate rowers during 6 min maximal rowing on different stretcher mechanisms: fixed (FE) and slides ergometer (SE). The association of muscle synergy to rowing economy and physiological variables was further quantify by statistical analysis. Method:  Ten collegiate rowers were recruited at the end of their competitive season. Muscle synergy was extracted from 16 rowing specific muscles using principal component analysis with varimax rotation. 6 min maximal rowing test was performed on Concept 2 FE and SE. Rowing performance and physiological variables were analyzed. Results: Rowers showed similar rowing performance on FE and SE in terms of total distance covered. Rowers rowed faster at shorter strokes when rowing on SE compared than rowing on FE. Greater maximal heart rate, energy expenditure and rowing economy were achieved on SE rowing. Three muscle synergies were extracted in both rowing conditions. Significant association was found between Synergy #1 and rowing economy. Discussion: Muscle synergy was robust between two rowing conditions. Rowing economy was highly associated with muscle synergy. As there was no significant difference in muscle synergy pattern and rowing performance during rowing on FE and SE, both ergometers could be utilized by experienced rowers.

A Systematic Review on Muscle Synergies: From Building Blocks of Motor Behavior to a Neurorehabilitation Tool

“…Shaharudin et al analyzed a group of untrained individuals performing rowing movements on slide and fixed ergometers [ 126 ]. The results were consistent with those of previous studies.…”

“…The results were consistent with those of previous studies. Muscle synergies were modulated, but their structure remained the same [ 59 , 126 ]. The CNS had distributed the weights of the muscles differently for rowing on a slide ergometer (leg muscles) and a fixed ergometer (back muscles) to minimize injuries.…”

“…Barroso's research on MS stated that functional motor impairment (spinal cord injury) quantitative assessment was performed well while cycling. Muscle synergy modulation plays a vital role in sports performance and, in the future, can become a vital tool in recovery from injury [ 55 , 124 , 126 ].…”

The mechanical loading and muscle activation of four common exercises used in osteoporosis prevention for early postmenopausal women

“…acceleration and EMG were automatically synchronised with Noraxon hardware (Noraxon, DTS Desk Receiver System, Arizona, USA). EMG data were band-pass filtered (bi-directional Butterworth, 10-500 Hz), full wave rectified and low-pass filtered at 8 Hz to obtain linear envelopes (Shaharudin et al, 2014). Baseline EMG amplitude for each muscle was calculated as 3 standard deviations above the mean value from the standing static trial and was removed from the exercise trials for each muscle leaving EMG activity due to exercise only.…”

Degraded Synergistic Recruitment of sEMG Oscillations for Cerebral Palsy Infants Crawling

“…These studies have indicated that the resulted multi-scale oscillations are mode-aligned across channels, and analysis of multiple oscillations is at the same scale. To obtain the synergistic pattern of multiple elements, although component-based algorithms, such as principal component analysis (PCA) ( 26 , 27 ) and independent component analysis (ICA) ( 28 ), have been introduced to extract synergies, non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a better choice ( 29 , 30 ) due to its non-negative constraint for all the matrices (the raw matrix and the obtained matrices). A few works have demonstrated that NMF can be used to extract muscle synergies from multi-channel sEMG signals in upper limb muscles during motion tasks ( 31 ), even to obtain activation patterns of muscle-tendon units and time-vary coefficient curves from high-density sEMG signals during dynamic motion tasks ( 32 ).…”