The effect of the use of a pressure biofeedback unit on rectus abdominis activation during a ‘motor control’ stability exercise

Abstract

Normally the superficial muscles have the function to work on high load activities to help local and global stabilizers on joint control as they have predominantly fast/fatiguing fibers. But even those muscles have some tonic fibers and sometimes fascial attachments. PBU have been used by physiotherapists as a resource to get better recruitment of muscles during ‘motor control’ stability training. To study the effect of a pressure biofeedback unit (PBU) on rectus abdominis activation during a ‘motor control’ stability exercise. Electrodes were placed on rectus abdominis. 25 females with low back pain between 42 and 55 years old performed five repetitions of a motor control stability exercise on crooked lying. A pressure biofeedback unit (PBU) from Chattanooga brand was used on lumbar spine to control it during the exercise. Subjects were asked to keep it on 40 mmHg. To get EMG data, a Miotool 400 from Miotec brand was used and the rectus abdominals signals were obtained by bipolar surface electrodes according to SENIAM. The mean activation of RMS signal was considered and the significance level adopted were 0.05. The data from this work has to be linked with other evidences as only one muscle could be studied. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA and post-hoc of Bonferroni (P < 0.05) was used. The muscle activation were 122.32 μV and 142.43 μV on right and left sides respectively without PBU. With PBU activation were 214.76 μV and 223.02 μV. There were a statistically relevance with P = 0.002. PBU seems to help getting a higher activation of rectus abdominis during this motor control stability exercise. We suggest for future works to collect data from other muscles together for a better interpretation.