Boys–men mean-power-frequency differences in progressive exercise to exhaustion, confounded by variability and adiposity

Background Only scant research has compared children’s mean power frequency (MPF) to adults’, with a clear overview still lacking. A significant obstacle has been MPF’s high variability, which this study aimed to overcome by elucidating the MPF characteristics distinguishing boys from men in progres...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:European journal of applied physiology 2024-02, Vol.124 (2), p.491-505
Main Authors: Dotan, Raffy, Woods, Stacey, Langille, Jordan, Falk, Bareket
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adipose tissue
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Children & youth
Electromyography
Fatigue
Human Physiology
Hypotheses
Muscle contraction
Occupational Medicine/Industrial Medicine
Original Article
Physiology
Sports Medicine
Variance analysis
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Summary:Background Only scant research has compared children’s mean power frequency (MPF) to adults’, with a clear overview still lacking. A significant obstacle has been MPF’s high variability, which this study aimed to overcome by elucidating the MPF characteristics distinguishing boys from men in progressive exhaustive exercise. Methods Electromyographic (EMG) data of 20 men (23.5 ± 2.5yrs) and 17 boys (10.2 ± 1.0 yrs), who performed progressively exhausting, intermittent isometric knee extensions, were subjected to secondary MPF analysis. Participants’ vastus lateralis MPF data series were transformed to third-order polynomial regressions and expressed as percentages of the peak polynomial MPF values (%MPF peak ). The resulting curves were compared at 5-% time-to-exhaustion (TTE) intervals, using repeated-measures ANOVA. Raw MPF peak values were adiposity corrected to 0% fat and used to convert the %MPF peak data back to absolute MPF values (Hz) for estimating muscle-level MPF. Results No overall interaction or group effects could be shown between the %MPF peak plots, but pairwise comparisons revealed significantly higher men’s values at 50–70%TTE and lower at 100%TTE, i.e. boys’ shallower MPF rise and decline. The adiposity-corrected boys’ and men’s composite MPF values peaked at 125.7 ± 2.5 and 166.0 ± 2.4 Hz, respectively (110.7 ± 1.7 and 122.5 ± 2.1 Hz, uncorrected), with a significant group effect ( p  
ISSN:1439-6319
1439-6327
DOI:10.1007/s00421-023-05292-3