Traditional sEMG fatigue indicators applied to a real-world sport functional activity: Roundhouse kick

Nowadays, the study of sMEG has became of highly relevance for scientist due to it may be a a new and less invasive pathway for assessing muscle fatigue level. However, these well-known predictors have been tested only in controlled situations where movements are carried out in only one anatomical plane. The objective of this study was to observe the behavior of these features in a more real-life environment involving multi-planar and multi-joint movements such as the case of roundhouse kick in Taekwon Do. Six athletes 23±3.5 years old and BMI of 24.08±3.20 participated in the fatigue protocol. First, the value one-repetition maximum (1RM) was found in order to standardize each subject workload to 80% of 1RM value. Then the subjects were told to perform the functional movement until fatigue were reach. To acquire the raw EMG, three samples were recorded (beginning, middle and end of total experiment) to describe the EMG fatigue behavior over time. Once the data were acquired and EMG features were extracted, the t-sudent test was used to identify statistical significance in the study´s findings. Results shown that in MPF and IEMG values were only significant in subject number five (p<0.05).