Proprioceptive Facilitation of Muscle Tension During Unilateral and Bilateral Knee Extension

Effects of Different Rest Intervals Between Antagonist Paired Sets on Repetition Performance and Muscle Activation

“…Furthermore, the greatest effects in repetition performance and muscle activation were evident when the KE exercise was performed immediately after the KF exercise without rest between APS. The increase in repetition performance after antagonist preactivation was consistent with previous studies examining the manipulation of the antagonist musculature as a preactivation stimulus to facilitate greater performance in the agonist musculature (2)(3)(4)11,25). Perhaps surprisingly, no significant increase in repetitions was evident for the KE in the 3--and 5--minute rest protocols vs. the TP that did not involve the antagonist manipulation.…”

“…Arguably, a shortening of the antagonist braking burst would allow for a larger aggregate agonist firing period and could conceivably result in performance enhancement (19). However, the increase in repetition performance found in this study is in agreement with the mechanisms proposed by Roy et al (25). They suggested that the preactivation characteristic of APS training has a positive effect on agonist muscles because of the facilitatory stimulation of Golgi tendon organs of knee flexor muscles and muscle spindles of extensor muscles.…”

Effects of different methods of antagonist muscles pre-activation on knee extensors neuromuscular responses

“…Despite the lack of significance, this is an important practical observation, because a 4% difference between the protocols may represent benefits for an athlete or individual who is in process of rehabilitation and needs strength to carry a specific activity. In fact, Roy et al 17 suggested that the advantages stemming from reciprocal actions are due to facilitatory stimulation of the Golgi tendon organs (GTOs) of the flexor muscle and muscles spindles of extensors muscle, assigned to prior flexion. Their findings show that the reciprocal modality tends to generate a greater torque of the knee extensors, which would explain lower decrease in the RC condition.…”

“…Additionally, Bohannon, Gibson and Larkin 15 showed no difference in strength between the RC method and a traditional method (without pre-activation of the antagonist) in healthy subjects. On the other hand, other studies have shown benefits of RC 16,17,19 , but the conclusions were based on exercises conducted with simple series, ie, only one set (defined as a group of repetitions developed continuously, without interruption) although resistance exercises are most commonly based on more than one set (multiple sets).…”

“…Among the types of agonists pre-activation, we can highlight the methods known as superset (SS) [9][10][11][12][13] and reciprocal contractions (RCs) [14][15][16][17][18][19] . The findings concerning the effectiveness of these protocols are controversial and methodological variations makes it difficult to compare the benefits of both forms of exercises.…”