Central nervous system (CNS) uses the combination of a small number of motor primitives, named muscle synergies, for simplification of motor control in human movement. The aim of this study was to investigate the muscle coordination in both leg muscles during pedaling by time-varying muscle synergy extraction. Twenty healthy subjects performed three 6-min cycling tasks over a range of rotational speed (40, 50, and 60 rpm) and resistant torque (3, 5, and 7 N/M). Surface electromyography signals were recorded during pedaling from eight muscles of the right and left lower limbs. We extracted four time-varying muscle synergies from sEMG patterns. Mean and standard deviation of the quality of the signal reconstruction (R2) for all subjects was obtained 0.9328 ± 0.0120. We investigated the similarity of muscle synergies during cycling across various mechanical conditions. We found the high degrees of similarity (>0.85) among the sets of time-varying muscle synergies across mechanical conditions and also across subjects. Our results show that the same motor control strategies for cycling are used by all subjects in various mechanical conditions.
The paper analyzes a pedaling technique with platform pedals in which the influence of the geometric and tribological parameters on the torque course of the active forces in the crank rotation axis is determined. Distribution of forces of feet acting on pedals as a function of the crank rotation angle was performed and on this basis the specific pedaling zones and their ranges and the courses of the value of variable active torque and pedaling work during the full cycle were determined. The course of changes in the movements in the ankle joint is described with a function depending on the crank and limb position and loading of the joint. A numerical example has also been presented and a discussion of the results has been carried out.
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