Short communicationHamstring muscle forces prior to and immediately following an acute sprinting-related muscle strain injury
Introduction
Hamstring strains commonly occur whilst sprinting [1], [2]. In order to optimise injury rehabilitation and prevention strategies, a thorough understanding of hamstrings function during sprinting is required. Computer-based musculoskeletal models have recently been utilised for this purpose, however, existing data are limited to treadmill sprinting and to the swing phase portion of the sprinting cycle [3], [4]. In the current study, lower-limb muscle forces were determined using a unique dataset captured from a single subject whilst walking, jogging and sprinting prior to and immediately following a hamstring strain. Preliminary analyses of this dataset involving joint kinematics and inverse dynamics only have already been published [5]. In this study, new analyses were performed that aimed to: (a) evaluate the relative contributions of the primary hip extensor and knee flexor muscles to the net sagittal-plane hip and knee joint torques measured for sprinting; (b) compare hamstrings load across the different modes of locomotion; (c) determine if asymmetries in the biomechanics of the hamstrings were evident for sprinting; and (d) compare hamstrings load pre- and post-injury.
Section snippets
Materials and methods
Data were acquired from a male Australian Rules football player (height = 186.0 cm; body mass = 91.5 kg; age = 20.3 years). The study was approved by the institutional Human Research Ethics Committee and written informed consent was obtained. Kinematic data were recorded using a 3D motion analysis system with eight cameras sampling at 120 Hz. Three force-plates centred within a calibrated measurement volume of 4 m in length recorded all ground reaction force data. Thirty-six reflective markers were
Results
The walking and jogging speeds were 1.18 and 1.97 m/s, respectively. The average (±1 S.D.) sprinting speed for the pre-injury trials was 7.44 ± 0.10 m/s. The sprinting speed for the injury trial was 6.93 m/s. For sprinting, the hamstrings contributed most of the terminal swing hip extension and knee flexion torques (Fig. 1, top panels), whilst gluteus maximus contributed most of the stance phase hip extension torque (Fig. 1, left middle panel). Gastrocnemius contributed little to the terminal swing
Discussion
This study found that hamstrings load for sprinting was greatest during terminal swing. The hamstrings provided a large contribution to the hip extensor and knee flexor torques during terminal swing for sprinting (Fig. 1, top panels) and, in contrast to walking and jogging, peak hamstrings force for sprinting was considerably greater during terminal swing compared to stance (Table 1; Fig. 2, top panels). This result is consistent with electromyographic data during sprinting reported by
Conflict of interest statement
None declared.
Acknowledgements
Financial support for this project was provided by the Physiotherapy Research Foundation Tagged Sports Physiotherapy Australia Research Grant (T08-THE/SPA(1)018), a Victorian Endowment for Science, Knowledge and Innovation (VESKI) Fellowship, and an Australian Research Council Discovery Project Grant (DP0772838).
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