CENTRAL FATIGUE AFTER PROLONGED RUNNING

Abstract

Fatigue can be caused by a failure in neural activation (central) and/or in force generating capacity of the muscle (peripheral). Using the twitch interpolation technique, central fatigue was demonstrated after prolonged running in the knee extensors (Millet et al., 2003), but not in the plantar flexor muscle group (Finni et al., 2003; Racinais et al., 2006) despite marked involvement in running propulsion. However, the paradigm in the latter studies appears to have limited the testing only to parts of the triceps surae. Therefore, the aim of this study was to use the twitch interpolation technique to investigate central and peripheral fatigue in the entire plantar flexor muscle group after prolonged running.