Effects of Whole Body Vibration and Static Stretching on Attenuation of Delayed Onset of Muscle Soreness Following Eccentric Exercise

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of vibration and static stretching on delayed onset of muscle soreness (DOMS) following eccentric exercise. Twenty-four trained university males participated in this study. Maximal heart rate, muscle soreness (MS), range of motion (ROM), serum lacate dehydrogenase (LDH) and creatine kinase (CK) levels were measured prior to the experiment, and then, all subjects were randomly assigned into vibration-stretching (VT, n = 8), static-stretching (SE, n = 8) or control (CON, n = 8) groups. On day 1 of this study, VT group performed static stretching with vibration (1.5 mm, 50 Hz, 3 × 60 s, 3 exercises) and SE group performed static stretching (3 × 60 s, 3 exercises), and then, all subjects performed eccentric exercise (85% heart rate reserve downhill running for 30 min). On day 2 ~ 4 of this study, MS, ROM, LDH and CK were measured. In this study, two-way analysis of variance (group by time) with repeated measures were employed for the statistical analysis, and the significance was set at α = .05. The MS, ROM, CK and LDH of both VT and SE groups showed significant differences compared to those of CON group (p ＜ .05). However, no significant difference was observed between VT and SE groups (p ＞ .05). The present findings suggests that SE and VT could attenuate the muscle damage following eccentric exercise, but static stretching combined with whole body vibration does not appear to significant dampen the degree of DOMS than the static stretching only.