Abstract
Purpose
In sport and exercise, warm-ups induce various physiological changes that facilitate subsequent performance. We have shown that delivering patterned stimulation to cutaneous afferents during sprint cycling mitigates fatigue-related decrements in performance, and that repeated sensory stimulation amplifies spinal reflex excitability. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess whether sensory enhancement of warm-up would affect subsequent high-intensity arm cycling performance.
Methods
Participants completed three experimental sessions, in which they randomly performed either a control, stim, or sleeve warm-up condition prior to maximal duration arm cycling. During the control condition, warmup consisted of low-intensity arm cycling for 15 min. The stim condition was the same, except they received alternating pulses (400 ms, 50 Hz) of stimulation just above their perceptual threshold to the wrists during warm-up. The third condition required participants to wear custom fabricated compression sleeves around the elbow during warm-up. Grip strength and spinal reflex excitability were measured before and after each warm-up and fatigue protocol, which required participants to arm cycle at 85% of peak power output until they reached volitional fatigue. Peak power output was determined during an incremental test at minimum 72 h prior to the first session.
Results
Both sensory enhanced warm-up conditions amplified subsequent high-intensity arm cycling performance by ~ 30%. Additionally, the stim and sleeve warm-up conditions yielded improvements in grip strength (increased by ~ 5%) immediately after the sensory enhanced warm-ups. Ergogenic benefits from the sensory enhanced warm-up conditions did not differ between one another.
Conclusion
These findings demonstrate that enhanced sensory input during warm-up can elicit improvements in both maximal and submaximal performance measures.
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Funding
This research was supported by Discovery Grant funding to EPZ from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. GEP was partially funded by a doctoral award from NSERC. A portion of the funding for this project was obtained as in-kind equipment and from a research contract-for-hire from NIKE Inc.
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GEP and EPZ conceived and designed the research. BN and GEP conducted experiments. BN and GEP analyzed data. BN and GEP wrote the manuscript. BN, GEP, BM, and EPZ read and approved the manuscript.
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One author (EPZ) has worked in the capacity as a consultant for NIKE Inc. and BM is an employee of NIKE Inc. Funding bodies were involved in providing comments on the design of the study but had no role in data collection, analysis, interpretation or presentation of results. The authors further certify and declare that none of these potentially competing interests had any impact on the analysis, interpretation of results, or conclusions derived within the article.
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Communicated by Nicolas Place.
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Nazaroff, B.M., Pearcey, G.E.P., Munro, B. et al. Sensory enhancement of warm-up amplifies subsequent grip strength and cycling performance. Eur J Appl Physiol 122, 1695–1707 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-022-04952-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00421-022-04952-0