RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RUNNING ECONOMY AND MECHANICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF TRICEPS SURAE ASSESSED WITH TENSIOMYOGRAPHY: A PILOT STUDY

Authors

  • Diego Moreno-Pérez Departament of Education, Research and Evaluation Methods, Comillas Pontifical University, Madrid
  • Álvaro López-Samanes Exercise Physiology Group, School of Physiotherapy, Faculty of Health Sciences, Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, Madrid
  • Aitor Centeno Faculty of Sport Sciences, Universidad Europea de Madrid, Madrid
  • Jonathan Esteve-Lanao AIYM Training System, Mérida
  • Ignacio Diez-Vega Departamento de Enfermería y Fisioterapia, Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud, Universidad de León

Abstract

Tensiomyography (TMG) is a non-invasive technique commonly used for evaluating muscle properties in highly trained athletes. The aim of our study was to evaluate the mechanical characteristics of m. triceps surae in competitive runners through TMG measurement and analyze if there was a relationship with running economy (RE). Nine male runners completed the study (mean±SD: age 40.4±9.0 years, body height 176.2±4.9 cm, body mass 70.7±9.4 kg, 10-km time 39.8±5.9 min, VO2peak 56.9 ± 6.5 mL kg-1 min-1). Each subject visited the lab on two occasions with 72h of rest between the trials. On the first day, an incremental test was performed to determine their ventilatory thresholds and peak oxygen consumption. On the second day, RE was evaluated on a treadmill at the velocity of their first ventilatory threshold (VT1), and mechanical characteristics of the soleus and gastrocnemius muscles were analyzed with TMG. Significant differences were found between the economic and non-economic runners in m. soleus in delayed time (Td), contraction time (Tc), and maximal radial displacement of the muscle belly (Dm). Also, significant differences were found in contraction time (Tc) in medium calf (MC) and in half relaxation time (Tr) in lateral twin (LT). The main finding of our study was that the runners with better RE showed greater stiffness in the triceps surae muscles, an aspect that seems to be associated with better performance in athlete runners.
Key words: running economy (RE), tensiomyography (TMG), m. triceps surae, m. gastrocnemius, m. soleus

Downloads

Published

2020-12-11

How to Cite

Moreno-Pérez , . D. ., López-Samanes, Álvaro, Centeno, A. ., Esteve-Lanao, J. ., & Diez-Vega, I. . (2020). RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RUNNING ECONOMY AND MECHANICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF TRICEPS SURAE ASSESSED WITH TENSIOMYOGRAPHY: A PILOT STUDY. Kinesiology, 52(2), 273–280. Retrieved from https://hrcak.srce.hr/ojs/index.php/kinesiology/article/view/8531

Issue

Vol. 52 No. 2 (2020)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

At Faculty of Kinesiology we recognize that access to quality research is vital to the scientific community and beyond. Kinesiology is non-profit journal and all costs of publishing and peer review process are covered by the publisher itself or other funding sources like Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia.   Full text papers are also available free of charge at http://hrcak.srce.hr/kineziologija. There are no restrictions on self archiving of any form of paper (preprint, postprint and publisher's version). 

Articles are distributed under the terms of the CC BY - NC 4.0

Kinesiology does not charge any fees to authors to submit or publish articles in our journal.