Muscle recovery from a short fatigue test and consequence on the reliability of EMG indices of fatigue

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate if rest intervals of 10 or 15 min allow the back muscles to recover completely, from an electromyographic (EMG) point of view, after performing a fatiguing contraction. Twelve healthy males stood in a dynamometer with the trunk in a vertical position and performed three trunk extension fatiguing trials (30 s contractions sustained at 75% of the maximal voluntary contraction) separated successively by a 15 min (between trial 1 and 2) and a 10 min (between trial 2 and 3) rest period. The EMG signals from four pairs of back muscles were collected at 2,048 Hz with active surface electrodes. Different EMG indices computed from the temporal and frequency domains of the EMG signal were considered to evaluate muscular fatigue and recovery from trial 1 to trial 2 and from trial 2 to trial 3. No significant differences (one-way ANOVAs between the three trials, α=0.05) were obtained for the different EMG indices computed. The percentage of variance explained by the inter-trial effect was none in most cases, corroborating that no systematic error was present between the trials and suggesting that complete muscle recovery was allowed with 10 or 15 min rest periods. These results support the use of rest periods of 10 to 15 min between multiple fatigue tests, at least for back muscles and for high intensity short duration fatigue tasks as the one used in the present study.