Research

Thesis title: Muscle coordination and joint load compared between heel raise exercise variations performed by dancers and sprinters

Thesis outline: My PhD project aims to advance basic understandings on muscle coordination, which refers to the force sharing strategy between redundant muscles. This research field has the potential to contribute to the prevention and rehabilitation of musculoskeletal disorders like tendinopathies. The strategies in muscle coordination show high variability between individuals for a given movement. Thus, it is worth investigating this variability during training and rehabilitation exercises like the heel raise which is often varied (e.g. by different foot positions, intensities, …) to target specific muscles of the plantar flexor group.

Dancers and sprinters will build two distinct populations to test if their athletic specializations may influence the chosen muscle coordination during variations of the heel raise exercise. I will focus on the methodology of musculoskeletal simulation that can be used to estimate acting muscle and joint forces. A workflow will be developed to personalize the muscle morphology of the underlying human models to the participants of this study.

Supervisors: Hans Kainz, Robert Csapo, Arnold Baca

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