Effect of a Walking Training Period with Rhythmic Visual Stimulation on Co-Contraction Select Muscles in Older Adult

Walking in aging is affected by neuromuscular and cognitive degradation processes. Increase attention to the organs during Simple and automated activities result increase co-contraction level as a compensatory mechanism. So the purpose of this research effect of a walking training period with rhythmic visual stimulation as an external attention on co-contraction of lower limb muscle in older adults, while walking to eliminate the attention of the muscles and joints and the co-contraction anomalies can improve.

30 healthy older adult men (60 to 75 years) voluntary participated in this research, and after Homogenization were randomly assigned to two control (no practice, walking without stimulation) and one experimental (walking with rhythmic visual stimulation) groups. The pattern of muscle activity including: soleus, tibialis anterior, vastus medialis vastus lateralis and biceps femoris while 90s normal walking was investigated from pre to post-test for evaluation of muscle co-contraction. This training was performed for 6 weeks, 3 sessions per week and each 20 minutes. Data analysis was performed by ANCOVA and Non-parametric Bootstrap models at the significance level of 0.05.

The results showed walking with visual interventions on muscle co-contraction after 6 weeks of program are not statistically significant (P ≤ 0/05).

These results suggest that walking with visual rhythmic stimulation does not affect on co-contraction of selected muscles in early elderly age, it seems that, longer training periods (both in terms of duration and of the number and timing of training sessions) are need for saw significant changes in complex muscle patterns.