The effects of the angles of the knee and heel-off on the muscle activity during a bridge exercise

Abstract

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the angles of the knee and heel-off on the muscle activity during a bridge exercise. METHODS: 15 healthy adult men and women with the balance ability and joint working range required for performing a bridge exercise participated in this study, in which 120°, 90° and 60° angles of the knee-flexion and heel-off were applied during the bridge exercise. RESULTS: Our data showed that there were significant differences in muscle activities of elector spinae and rectus abdominis when 120°and 60°angles of the knee were applied, of internal oblique when 120°and 60°were applied, and external oblique when 90°and 60°were applied. When heel-off was applied, there were significant differences in muscle activities of elector spinae and rectus abdominis when 120°and 60°were applied, of internal oblique when 120°and 60°were applied, and external oblique when 90°and 60°were applied. CONCLUSION: In this study on an application of heel-off to the bridge exercise, we showed that the effect of †Corresponding Author: ptlsk@deu.ac.kr This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. the angles of the knee on the muscle activities of elector spinae, rectus abdominis, internal oblique and external oblique were all similar to the regular bridge exercise, but overall muscle activities were increased with heel-off when compared with the regular bridge exercise.