Effective Assessments of a Short-duration Poor Posture on Upper Limb Muscle Fatigue before Physical Exercise

Abstract

A forward head and rounded shoulder posture is a poor posture that is widely seen in everyday life. It is known that sitting in such a poor posture with long hours will bring health issues such as muscle pain. However, it is not known whether sitting in this poor posture for a short period of time will affect human activities. This paper investigates the effects of a shortduration poor posture before some typical physical activities such as push-ups. The experiments are set up as follows. Fourteen male subjects are asked to do push-ups until fatigue with two surface electromyography (sEMG) at the upper limb. Two days later, they are asked to sit in this poor posture for 15 mins with 8 sEMG sensors located at given back muscles. Then they do the push-ups after the short-duration poor posture. The observations from the median frequency of sEMG signals at the upper limb indicate that the short-duration poor posture does affect the fatigue procedure of push-ups. A significant decreasing trend of the performance of push-ups is obtained after sitting in this poor posture. Such effects indicate that some parts of the back muscles indeed get fatigued with only 15 minutes sitting in this poor posture. By further investigating the time-frequency components of sEMG of back muscles, it is observed that the low and middle frequencies of sEMG signals from the infraspinatus muscle of the dominant side are demonstrated to be more prone to fatigue with the poor posture. Although this study focuses only on push-ups, similar experiments can be arranged for other physical exercises as well. This study provides new insights into the effect of a short-duration poor posture before physical activities. These insights can be used to guide athletes to pay attention to postures before physical activities to improve performance and reduce the risk of injury.

Chaleco Inteligente para Corrección de Postura con Retroalimentación

“…En los últimos años, el uso prolongado de dispositivos electrónicos, como teléfonos inteligentes y computadoras portátiles, ha contribuido al aumento de la mala postura (Susilowati et al, 2022). Con una postura adecuada se pueden prevenir futuros problemas como dolores de espalda o lumbalgias (Procuraduría Federal del Consumidor, 2020) además de poder prevenir lesiones para atletas o personas que realizan ejercicio físico (Lu et al, 2020). Los chalecos correctores de postura son de gran ayuda para corregir este problema creciente en los estudiantes, principalmente ayudan a estimular la memoria muscular haciendo que la postura mejore (Lambán Azcona, 2018) además de mantener una postura óptima para las articulaciones y mejorar la calidad de sueño (Vijayalakshmi et al, 2022).…”